Thank You, Jim Rooney

I would imagine the Rooney family group chat, if there is such a thing, was popping off sometime around noon on January 22^nd. I would also imagine that Art Rooney II was none too happy with his brother. Might have even sent him some of those angry-face emojis.

Jim Rooney committed a cardinal sin while on Ross Tucker’s podcast; he told the truth. More to the point, he made comments that offered a likely window into how the highest levels of the Steelers’ organization thinks.

News flash: If you’re a fan frustrated by eight straight years without a playoff victory, the team thinks you might be missing the real story.

That’s right. I’m talking performance relative to the NFL mean. Put *that* on a trophy.

Asked by Tucker what he thought about fan frustration with the lack of recent postseason success under Mike Tomlin, this is what Rooney said:

I think it’s an organization issue, not just Mike. I think all of us are responsible for the outcomes, and I think we take responsibility. I don’t want to get into excuse-making, but the reality is we outperform the NFL mean at a greater rate than just about any team for the last 25 years. Another team that has been in that category in terms of outperforming that mean has been the Ravens. There’s no other team in either case that have been as successful and has a division rival that has outperformed the mean. So you know, when you look at the challenges we face, I think if this was a boxing match and you were judging the competition, not just looking at the winning percentage, you would have to say that we have performed in a harder circumstance than most, and we have outperformed them.

Still with me? Blood pouring out of your eyes yet? Buck up. You can do this.

Having said that, I understand no one wants to lose playoff games. The goal is to win the Super Bowl. And you have to get to the playoffs, which we do well, and you have to win playoff games, which we haven’t. The other excuse I’ll make there though also, let’s throw this in, is, we’ve lost some bad playoff games, but we’ve also lost to three guys that have some pretty unique names: Manning, Brady and Mahomes. That’s the playoff route we have to go to get to those wins. Again, I don’t want to be making any excuses, but I also think if you’re going to make an argument you should look at the facts in the matter and I think that the Steelers organization and Mike Tomlin have outperformed any expectation you could have of any NFL team in terms of who they have to play against, what the competition looks like, et cetera.

Whew. Okay. We made it.

Before we go any further, I should point out that Jim has no role in the organization; he’s just the owner’s brother. If his comments are brought up to Art when he meets the media tomorrow, he’ll say something like, “With all due respect to my brother, those are his opinions and do not reflect mine, nor those of the organization at large.” That said, I hardly think that Jim is unaware of how his brother thinks and feels about the franchise. Something tells me he’s got a little more insight than Joe in Blawnox or Jane in Wilmerding.

The first word that popped into my head when I heard Jim speaking was “disconnected.” Again, I know he’s not affiliated with the team in any formal way, but he has access to the owner that very few do. For a long time, one of the biggest advantages the Rooneys had over whoever might have been owning the Pirates or the Penguins – until Mario Lemieux took over, in the latter case – was that they were true Pittsburghers, North Siders who were truly part of the fabric of the city. They weren’t big-money outsiders, they were us.

The main benefit of that connection was a genuine understanding of expectations, and a sense of kinship with the rest of the city. They understood, particularly from the early-1970s onward, how important the Steelers were to Pittsburgh, and ran them accordingly. Dan Rooney in particular grasped this at a deep level, and was most responsible for their dynastic success in the 70s, and their rebirth in the early 90s.

The Steelers under Art are increasingly disconnected from the fan base, and from reality, to say nothing of being disconnected from Tomlin’s favorite saying, “The standard is the standard.”

They might collectively express token frustration about not winning playoff games, but there are never the kinds of significant changes that actually back up such words. After 2022, Art said he was encouraged by the team’s performance down the stretch, that one of the goals of any season is to improve as the season progresses. After 2023, he spoke of getting impatient, of feeling a sense of urgency to start winning playoff games and making deep runs.

The Steelers still haven’t done those things, and unlike the 2022, or even the 2023 team, this one cratered down the stretch. Tomlin promised changes, yet as of this writing not a single coaching change has been announced. The Texans actually won a playoff game this year and still decided to dismiss offensive coordinator Bobby Slowik, who at this time last year was a hot-shot head coaching candidate.

Who knows if the move works for Houston, but I know this: One franchise appears to care about results, the other cares about appearances. The arrogance and excuse-making are both jaw-dropping to behold.

Thanks for reading Nine Straight Threes! This post is public so feel free to share it.

All Jim Rooney did was say it out loud, and in plain terms. Lose in the playoffs? Well look who we had to go through. It’s certainly not as if we had a future Hall of Fame quarterback in those games. (Also, please do not look behind the curtain, at the atrocious loss to Blake Bortles.)

Focusing so much on outperforming some sort of nebulous, competition-based expectation is weak. If that’s what the Steelers did, then they’re just any old team. To be fair, at this point a run-of-the-mill NFL team is exactly what they are. But guys like Jim Rooney, and Art Rooney II, and Tomlin pretend they’re something more than that. They carry themselves with the regal weight of one of the NFL’s premier franchises, something they haven’t been in at least a decade, probably longer.

The whole operation is rotten; the Steelers don’t employ nearly as many coaches as other, better teams. Instead, they pay their head coach nearly $17 million annually (his three-year extension is reportedly worth $50 million) and expect him to make up the difference. Tomlin is no doubt fine with this because he wants plenty of micro-managerial control, despite the results he’s producing not warranting such control, and because he’s making plenty of money. It’s cheapness and incompetence wrapped into one.

I can write that, and you can read that, and we can both know it is true, as are numerous other flaws in this organization. We’ve all watched the whole thing slowly erode over several years. That’s irrelevant, though, because the stewards of this organization don’t agree with that assessment, regardless of what they say publicly. The real standard is their standard, the one Jim Rooney clumsily laid bare last week, and if you don’t like it, tough luck.

It’s not going anywhere.