Being an NFL head coach is hard. A head coach has to balance the personalities of a 53-man roster, his coaching staff, the general manager and ownership, all the while trying to win the Super Bowl. Every decision has consequences. It’s why head coaches look like they’re aging in decades, not years.
Pro Football Hall of Famer and former Pittsburgh Steelers head coach Bill Cowher knows all about that. He had to follow in the footsteps of the legendary Chuck Noll. That is more pressure than most coaches deal with. That’s before even having to deal with navigating the choppy waters of what’s best for the team versus the players in front of him.
Cowher joined Jim Rome on The Reinvention Project podcast on Friday. He relayed a story of a time he was wrestling with a big decision and detailed the conversation with former team president and chairman Dan Rooney.
“I’m thinking I may change quarterbacks in the middle of this game. And I just want you to know beforehand,” Cowher said about what he told Rooney. “He would turn and walk away, he’d get to the doorway, he would look back, and he goes, ‘Coach, just do the right thing.’ And I go, ‘OK, that didn’t help’… But you know what he did? He made you think about the consequences of the choices that you made. And sometimes the choice that you make, and the easy one was to acclimate to whatever the player wanted.
“But sometimes you have to send a message, and sometimes there was a bigger picture involved,” Cowher continued. “And so I go back to the same thing. Sometimes the choice you make isn’t always the easiest choice. And the easiest choice isn’t always the right choice, trying to keep everybody happy. So I lived by those things, by doing the right thing. And I didn’t worry about how I was being perceived, ’cause in my mind, what I was trying to do was win a championship. And I knew along the way, I had to make tough decisions.”
Head coaches have to set the vision and tone for the football team. Yes, the ownership can have a vision for how they want their team to look. The general manager will likely have their own thoughts on how the team should look. However, at the end of the day, the head coach is the one directly communicating that vision to the players and the rest of the coaching staff. The head coach is also getting direct feedback from those same coaches and players. They’ll hear good things when things are going well. They’ll also get an earful when things are going poorly, or when someone doesn’t like a decision they made.
If a player, especially a starter or veteran, is hurt by a decision, that can make practices, meetings and even gameday hard. For Cowher and other coaches, the temptation to not rock the proverbial boat can be overwhelming. However, the underlying truth that a change is necessary will sit in the back of the mind and fester.
How does a head coach navigate that? By keeping the long-term goal of winning a title in mind. In Dan Rooney’s mind, decisions made with that goal in mind were the right decision. So, if Bill Cowher thought that making a quarterback switch – even in the middle of a game – was going to help the Steelers pursue their goal of winning a championship, that was the right decision to make.
That doesn’t make the decision of yanking a quarterback off the field in the middle of the game easier in the moment. It did give Bill Cowher the confidence and conviction to make the move, though. It also gave him a compass for every decision he had to make going forward.
That’s why, when head coach Mike Tomlin stepped down after the season, Bill Cowher was open to the idea of the Steelers changing their long-term style of play. For Cowher, the emphasis had to be on winning football games and eventually the Super Bowl. If that meant changing how the offense looked, so be it.
Yes, the Steelers want to be tough and run the ball. But more than that, the Steelers want to win championships. That had to be the guiding light for Bill Cowher.
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