Mike Tomlin breaks silence on retirement from Steelers

This article originally appeared on SteelersNOW.com.

Former Pittsburgh Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin will be joining the Football Night in America broadcast team for NBC Sports this fall, following his retirement from coaching in January, and on Sunday, he broke his silence about his decision to step away from the Steelers and coaching.

Tomlin, in his debut appearance on NBC, sat down with Maria Taylor during Sunday’s NBA Showtime pregame show to break the news publicly about him joining the broadcast crew and discuss his decision to step down after 19 seasons leading the Steelers. Taylor asked Tomlin if there was a “blink” moment that caused him to decide to leave coaching at this time.

“It’s probably not an overnight decision, but it’s probably not something that I could articulate or share with people,” he said. “There’s a loneliness with leadership. I just thought it was a good time for me personally, and by that, I just mean where I am in life. I thought it was a good time for the organization, to be quite honest with you. We didn’t have a lot of success in the playoffs in recent years and there’s just some veteran players there, man, guys like Cam Heyward and T.J. Watt and [Chris] Boswell, that I thought were worthy of the excitement and the optimism associated with new leadership.”

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