PITTSBURGH — If the Pittsburgh Steelers' history of coaching searches means anything in their fourth such venture since 1969, the Rooney family has a type of coach that's made their franchise one of the most successful ones of the modern era.

Chuck Noll, Bill Cowher and Mike Tomlin each came from the same background as assistant coaches of defensive position groups in the NFL while younger than 40 years old. And the early reports of the coaches they've scheduled interviews with suggest a similar path could be their plan for their 2026 hire.

Out of the coaches who've been reported to be scheduled for an interview, five of them have defensive backgrounds. Ejiro Evero, Brian Flores, Jesse Minter, Chris Shula and Anthony Weaver all spent their 2025 seasons as defensive coordinators. All but Weaver coached units that ranked in the upper half of the NFL in points allowed, and all but Shula and Weaver had units that finished in the upper half in yards allowed.

The Steelers have also scheduled interviews with coaches of offensive background such as Nate Scheelhaase and Klay Kubiak. And as of Sunday, former Packers and Cowboys coach Mike McCarthy is also in the mix.

That's a net that clearly favors defensive assistant coaches as Tomlin's successor. But is that a mistake in philosophy when comparing the more successful teams in the NFL?

Pendulum swings

The NFL is a cyclical league. When success is found by a few teams, others follow in an attempt to replicate and enhance trends that strike against the status quo of the NFL in that time. In the early 2000s, Cowher's iteration of the Steelers became the last team to deploy a 3-4 standard defense before other teams switched back to that style of a defensive front. As passing attacks enhanced in the NFL over the 2010s, defenses started to opt for quicker, faster defenders who helped against short passes and defend in space.

In response, offenses invested back into their run games to overpower smaller defenses. Teams like the Eagles, Ravens and Bills benefited from star running backs like Saquon Barkley, Derrick Henry and James Cook, while each also had quarterbacks who doubled as rushing threats in Jalen Hurts, Lamar Jackson and Josh Allen.

In many ways, trends in the NFL can swing like a pendulum. When the league switches in one direction, it eventually will swing in the other direction as teams attempt to counter the new trend that's become prominent.

A similar observation could be seen in the trends of which head coaches have been hired and their backgrounds.

As teams leaned into passing offenses, head coaches were hired as offensive gurus to pair with hopeful franchise quarterbacks. But now, there could be a sign the pendulum has begun to switch.

Over the past five years — counting from 2021-2025 — NFL teams have hired 35 head coaches prior to the start of a season. This excludes all interim head coaches to show where organizations put their faith in a coach to find their future.

Out of those 35 head coaches, 14 of them were coaches with backgrounds as defensive assistants and 21 of them had backgrounds as offensive assistants. While that does split close to even, the years when the coaches are hired show a swing.

From 2021-2023, 15 of the 22 head coaches hired had offensive backgrounds — more than doubling the seven head coaches hired with defensive backgrounds.

But in the past two years of hiring cycles, seven of the 12 head coaches hired came with defensive coaching backgrounds. That's not a complete shift in the other direction, but it's bucked a trend that had started to define the NFL.

The first two reported hires of the 2026 cycle are John Harbaugh to the Giants and Kevin Stefanski to the Falcons. Stefanski has a clear offensive background, while Harbaugh spent most of his assistant coaching years in the NFL as a special teams coordinator with a year as a defensive backs coach for the Eagles before the Ravens hired him in 2008 to be their head coach. So if you were to align Harbaugh to defense, it would keep the split for 2026 dead even with seven more coaching vacancies to be filled — including the Steelers.

While the 2026 hiring cycle still has to play out, Art Rooney II and Omar Khan have a choice to either be part of the pendulum swing that has more defensive coaches being hired, or to try to keep to the trend that had dominated NFL coaching hires before 2024.

But who has the success?

Out of the 35 head coaches hired over the past five seasons, only Nick Sirianni has won a Super Bowl. He's also the only head coach of that group to win a conference championship — let alone his two such wins — in his five years with the Eagles. Coaches such as Mike Vrabel of the Patriots and Ben Johnson of the Bears entered this weekend with a playoff win in their debut seasons, joined by two head coaches in their third years with their respective teams in DeMeco Ryans of the Texans and Sean Payton of the Broncos.

From the eight teams who made it to the divisional round of the playoffs this season, four were coaches with defensive backgrounds in Mike Macdonald of the Seahawks, Sean McDermott of the Bills, Ryans and Vrabel. The other four with offensive backgrounds were Johnson, Sean McVay of the Rams, Kyle Shanahan of the 49ers and Payton.

Out of the 35 head coaches hired from 2021-2025, 18 of them have made it to the playoffs at least once, and 12 of them have at least won one division title. Ten of the 18 coaches who've made it to the playoffs have offensive backgrounds, and eight of the 12 coaches with at least one division title have offensive backgrounds. That's slightly skewed by the coaches hired from 2021-2023 having more time — for the most part — to build their rosters and having more chances to accomplish those feats.

Over the past two hiring cycles, four offensive coaches have made it the playoffs compared to three defensive coaches — and three offensive coaches have won a division title compared two two defensive coaches.

That data plays out to show that over the past five years, hiring a coach for their background in either offense or defense doesn't pair with any empirical data to show success or failure one way or the other. Even considering coaches who were fired after just a single year with their team, four head coaches with offensive backgrounds have been fired compared to that of three such defensive head coaches — Pete Carroll being the latest.

So, how should that impact the Steelers' choice?

Don't 'narrow the box'

When Rooney spoke Wednesday, he noted the Steelers' course in choosing a head coach wouldn't be limited to looking at coaches with just a defensive background — even though all three of the Steelers' hires since 1969 were defensive assistants before they brought a Super Bowl to Pittsburgh.

And that's a good thing for the team.

"For now, I don't want to put any real parameters around it," Rooney said. "We're going to be an open book in terms of who we look for and the list that we build. Can I sign up for another Chuck Noll, or another Bill Cowher, or another Mike Tomlin? Sure, somebody that we feel fits that mold would be great. But for now, we're not going to kind of narrow the box too much."

The search for the Steelers' next leader of men shouldn't be about quantitative data. It should be about the actual leadership.

"There are a lot of things that go into being a successful head coach," Rooney said. "Number one, really, I think in my mind is leadership and really trusting that this person can stand up in front of your team day in and day out and hold their attention and have them motivated to do what they do. That's the most important."

That Rooney seems focused on that quality of a future head coach rather than trying to follow a trend in one direction or the other should serve as a positive sign for Steelers fans that the organization will take its next shot at head coach just like it took the last three.

While it doesn't guarantee successful results, it does show the Steelers aren't swayed by what's in vogue and are committed to what's led them to becoming a pillar organization of the NFL's modern era.

____

© 2026 the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Visit www.post-gazette.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.