Less than 12 hours after becoming the youngest NFL head coach to ever win a Super Bowl, Pittsburgh Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin is already focusing in his next one.
Literally.
Perhaps its fitting that Bruce Springsteen played during half time at Super Bowl XLIII as he’s the man who laid down 80´s track “No Surrender, No Retreat,” because Mike Tomlin’s new mantra is “No Defending, No Repeat.”
At his post-Super Bowl press conference, Mike Tomlin announced that he did not want to hear the word defend or repeat.
You won’t hear me say ‘repeat’ or ‘defending,’ because it’s brand new [from here]… The thing I’m going to sell to our football team, we’re not attempting to repeat…. There will be 53 new men in there. A lot of the faces will be the same, but nothing stays the same in this game. Those that remain, the roles will change….
I think repeating and defending Super Bowl championships in today’s NFL is something of a misnomer. When I walk down the hallway [at Steelers headquarters] and look at the championships of the Steelers from the’70s, it’s the same faces in the same positions on those photos, in terms of the Steel Curtain and so forth. That’s not the reality of today’s NFL, to be quite honest with you. We’ll start with a new group of men — hopefully a lot of them will be the same.
In the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette book Cowher Power, Gene Collier wrote that he attended the post Super Bowl XL conference for one reason: he wanted to see how victory affected Cowher. Collier claimed he observed a change in Cowher, and less than a year later Bill Cowher began a hiatus from coaching and continues to this day.
Not so with Tomlin. He’s a head coach who is hungry for more and is already doing his part to make sure his players share the feeling.
