By Week 13 of the 2025 season, Steel City had had enough of head coach Mike Tomlin. As the Pittsburgh Steelers trailed 23-7 in the third quarter at Acrisure Stadium against the Buffalo Bills, the fans erupted with “Fire Tomlin” chants. Things were so bad, they even booed the Renegade pump-up video in the fourth quarter. Even Tomlin addressed the chants after their 26-7 blowout, saying he shared their frustration and adding that his team didn’t do enough. But from a bird’s-eye view, things had started to spiral long before that.

On The Fehoko Show, former Steelers nose tackle Breiden Fehoko spoke about how this season is do-or-die for Los Angeles Rams head coach Sean McVay. While making his case, he dropped an iconic line from The Dark Knight (You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain), and connected it to what happened with Mike Tomlin.

“In this case, and in this particular situation, was something I am very familiar to and something I was there and a part of,” Fehoko said. “Mike Tomlin, one of the most legendary coaches in [the] NFL, in football history, will always be one of the most highly touted. He’ll go into the Hall of Fame first ballot 100%. But towards the end of Mike Tomlin’s tenure, how they looked at him, that quote is very relative to me.

“You either coach short enough to be the hero, or you coach long enough for them to see you as the villain. Towards the end of Mike Tomlin’s career in Pittsburgh, he was started to be looked at as a villain.”

After that lone Super Bowl win with the Steelers from the 2008 postseason, Tomlin’s journey in Steel City had been marred by continued playoff heartbreaks. Not even 19 straight non-losing seasons could put a positive spin on it.

As for the villain narrative that Fehoko paints, he’s not the only one who’s spoken up about how Coach Tomlin got in his own way. Back in August, backup quarterback Mason Rudolph highlighted a stark contrast between the coaching philosophies of Mike Tomlin and Mike McCarthy – the new head coach.

“There was a little bit more leeway on doing whatever was comfortable last year, which sometimes you appreciate as a player,” Rudolph said in a presser. “McCarthy’s been very like, ‘This is what we are going to do in quick game, intermediate drop, play-action, nakeds,’ and so I appreciate the structure because my first two years, I didn’t have a quarterbacks coach. It was kind of a free-for-all a bit, so I appreciate the structure.”

Last season, with offensive coordinator Arthur Smith working under Mike Tomlin, the QBs got a lot of freedom. But in McCarthy’s QB School, you have to follow a structure until you can prove that you’re worthy of that leeway. Now, going back to April, former Steelers linebacker Stevenson Sylvester outlined how Tomlin tried to do everything by himself, which didn’t translate into success.

“My third year, we took a dip. We let go of some veterans. It wasn’t as good as the years before,” Sylvester said on 97.5 Scotty G. & Friends. “What I saw, the difference was Mike Tomlin would try to do everybody else’s job. He would try to do the defensive coordinator’s job, the linebacker coach’s job, and it wouldn’t leave time for those guys to do their job. That created dysfunction.”

In May, former cornerback Darius Slay put Tomlin’s defensive philosophy on blast, noting that Tomlin relied too much on big builds up front to stop the quarterbacks. That overreliance on outside leverage, in Slay’s opinion, got in the Steelers’ way.

“It’s crazy. Them guys make plays. Don’t get me wrong. This is what these [coaches] were telling me, ‘You play outside leverage, and if they catch a ball inside, it’s on the [defensive] line because they’re so good at batting the ball down,’” Slay said on his Big Play Slay podcast. “I’m not banking on that. That’s the only thing I did not like about the defense. Everything was outside leverage in the red zone. That sh*t was weird as F**k. I never played that sh*t.”

Even with all this adversity, Breiden Fehoko makes the case that Coach Tomlin will be a first-ballot Hall of Famer. But when last season’s disasters spilled into December, former linebacker James Harrison made a contrasting case on his Deebo and Joe podcast, noting that he never thought of Tomlin as a great football coach.

“I have never been a person that thought Coach Tomlin was a great coach,” Harrison said. “A good coach gets you to play to your potential. And right now, the players we have on that team I have seen play; they’re not playing up to their potential. A great coach gets you to play to your potential.”

In his defense, even Mike Tomlin understood something needed to change in Steel City. After he decided to hang up his headset, he noted that “there’s a loneliness in leadership,” and wanted his old stars to taste some success.

“We didn’t have a lot of success in the playoffs in recent years,” Tomlin said in April. “There’s just some veteran players, guys like Cam Heyward, and TJ Watt, and [Chris] Boswell, that I thought were worthy of the excitement and the optimism associated with new leadership.”

The Steelers have optimism under Mike McCarthy now. When Tomlin retired, even veteran quarterback Aaron Rodgers thought about retiring. But it was the tantalizing prospect of playing for McCarthy once again that brought him back for one last season.

As for Tomlin, he has moved on to be on the panel of NBC’s Football Night in America – a role that has breathed new life into him, given him more time with his family, and kept his connection with football intact. All of this happened because he faced the truth that he wasn’t the right leader for the Steelers anymore. And since Breiden Fehoko drew the comparison with a quote from The Dark Knight, another quote from that 2008 movie (Tomlin’s last Super Bowl season) perhaps sums it up best:

‘Sometimes the truth isn’t good enough; sometimes people deserve more. Sometimes people deserve to have their faith rewarded…’