The new Pittsburgh Steelers coach isn’t all that young. His background isn’t in defense. And he’d already been a head coach — for a long time, for two other franchises — before.
That, on face value, goes against everything we know about the Steelers’ tendencies when it comes to hiring its coaches.
Then again, Mike McCarthy does share something in common with the franchise’s first two coaches — something that now binds those two men to two of the most recent three Steelers head coaches
They are natives of the Pittsburgh area.
But for what Greenfield’s McCarthy shares with Crafton’s Bill Cowher, Rochester’s Forrest Douds and the Coraopolis-raised Luby DiMeolo, he lacks in comparison to the three men who preceded him as Steelers’ coach.
Chuck Noll (hired in 1969), Cowher (1992) and Mike Tomlin (2007) were all at the time of their appointment sitting NFL defensive coordinators who were in their 30’s and had no prior head-coaching experience.
“In all three cases, these were bright young assistant coaches, and the Steelerss would give them time to learn how to be a head coach,” said longtime, now-retired Steelers play-by-play man Bill Hillgrove, who worked in media during all three previous Steelers coaching hires. “But I really think that the Mike McCarthy hire shouldn’t surprise anybody. Because you can’t give people time. This NFL is now a what-have-you-done-for-me-lately business. And that’s just what’s going on.”
The modern NFL world presents challenges unrecognizable to what Douds faced as the Steelers’ first coach in 1933 or DiMeolo the ensuing season. McCarthy’s job description bears a little more resemblance to that tasked to Noll, Cowher and especially Tomlin.
But that those three lasted so long in their roles and each won at least one Super Bowl led many observers to believe the Steelers had their “type” when it comes to matchmaking with a head coaching candidate.
It’s fair to say that the 62-year-old McCarthy, a former tight end whose experience as an assistant came all on offense, breaks that mold.
When McCarthy makes his Steelers’ debut in September, he will be the oldest coach the team has ever had. For none of the franchise’s 1,391 games over 93 years had a man in his 60’s been its coach. Noll came closest, announcing his retirement 10 days short of his 60th birthday.
Perhaps we should have seen this coming. After all, when asked directly if the Steelers would adhere to the young/defense/unknown coaching template that turned them from NFL also-ran into perennial power, team president Art Rooney II said he didn’t “want to put any real parameters around it.”
“We’re going to be an open book in terms of who we look for and the list that we build,” Rooney said during his news conference Jan. 14, a day after Tomlin stepped down.
Then again, Rooney also said then that the search process would “take at least a few weeks.”
Ten days later, it was done. It took 26 days for the Steelers to choose Cowher to succeed Noll in 1992. Fifteen days passed between the resignation of Cowher and the introduction of Tomlin in 2007.
The choice of McCarthy comes with an appearance that it was wrapped up as quickly as possible — less than 24 hours after league rules regarding minority interviews had been complied with. McCarthy and the Steelers also reached their verbal agreement two days before the Steelers would have been permitted to speak in person with a pair that they were thought to have great interest in — Los Angeles Rams assistants Chris Shula and Nathan Scheelhaase.
Judging by talk-show callers and X (Twitter) posts, the two from the Rams were the fan favorites.
Mike “Archie” Manning said that when word broke about the Steelers’ hire at the South Side bar he owns, “Archie’s,” the reaction was mixed.
“A few people liked it, a few didn’t,” said Manning, who was a high school basketball teammate of McCarthy’s. “On social media nowadays, the younger people like the ‘splash’ hires. Our generation, we like it.”
McCarthy is much closer to age to the 68-year-old Cowher than he is to any of the other eight men the Steelers interviewed (be it in person or over teleconference). They ranged in age from 35 (Scheelhaase) to 46 (Jeff Hafley).
The average age of those two, Shula, Jesse Minter, Brian Flores, Anthony Weaver, Klay Kubiak and Ejiro Evero is 41.6 — more than 20 years younger than McCarthy.
Cowher — who was hired 34 years ago and has been retired from coaching for 19 years — is only 6 ½ years McCarthy’s senior.
Whereas Noll and Tomlin were the NFL’s youngest and Cowher the second-youngest head coach at the time of each’s hire by the Steelers, McCarthy slots in as the league’s third-oldest coach in 2026. McCarthy is nine years older than Tomlin, who spent the past 19 seasons as his predecessor.
In a quirky twist that ties it all together, the only coach younger than Cowher during his debut 1992 season was a 32-year-old hired three weeks earlier by the Cincinnati Bengals.
That individual had three sons, the middle of which was 5 years old at the time of his father’s hire by the Bengals.
The coach was David Shula, and his middle son was Chris. Now 39, Chris interviewed virtually with the Steelers in the days after Tomlin stepped down. The Steelers hired McCarthy before they by league rule could sit down with Shula because Shula’s Rams advanced to Sunday’s NFC championship game.
David Shula has been out of the NFL since 1996. He’s only 3 ½ years older than McCarthy, who was a graduate assistant at Pitt when David Shula was hired by the Bengals and Chris was 5.
