On Tuesday, moments before news broke that Mike Tomlin was resigning as the Pittsburgh Steelers’ head coach, Tomlin held one last meeting with his players to let them know before the rest of the world found out. The reaction was a mixture of shock and sadness for the entire Steelers roster — no more so than for the team’s two biggest stars: quarterback Aaron Rodgers and outside linebacker T.J. Watt.
In an inside story about Tomlin’s final address to the team, The Athletic spoke with a half-dozen players and staffers to get a sense of what everyone saw, heard and felt.
One player said Watt was “visibly upset.” Sitting next to fellow veterans Cam Heyward and Alex Highsmith, all Watt could do was repeat “No. No. No. No. No,” his eyes welling with tears as Tomlin delivered his speech.
When Tomlin was done, every player in the room rose for a standing ovation. Tomlin tipped his cap and moved toward the door, where an impromptu receiving line formed, every player exchanging words and hugs with their now-former coach.
Rodgers made his way through the line. The Steelers had signed the quarterback last June in the hope that he could help end the franchise’s then-eight-year drought without a postseason win. When asked, Rodgers said Tomlin was the reason he signed with the Steelers rather than retiring, and the two grew close as the season went on.
But the team fell short when Pittsburgh fell to the Houston Texans in the wild-card round. After Monday night’s season-ending loss, the quarterback used what might have been his final public comments as a Steeler to deliver an impassioned defense of Tomlin. In the team meeting room Tuesday, Rodgers, through sobs, mustered one final, two-word message to the coach: “I’m sorry,” several players heard him say. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
A day later, many of the Steelers were still in shock. One player, recalling the meeting Wednesday, had to stop multiple times during the conversation, each time saying, “You’re going to make me cry again.”
“I felt that the meeting was going to go completely different,” he added. “When he said, ‘Some of us will be here and some of us won’t, that’s when I was like, ‘Is this guy really stepping down?’”
Along with shock and sadness, players who spoke with The Athletic also emphasized a feeling of guilt that they couldn’t get it done for Tomlin.
“Everyone feels that way,” one player said. “He’s the only (coach) that guys wanted to do it for. You think we didn’t want to get that monkey off his back that the whole city has been berating him for? Yeah, we all wanted that. That’s why it sucks.”