Mike McCarthy hire shows Steelers are content with mediocrity 

Mike McCarthy is not necessarily a bad football coach. He has won a Super Bowl, and history, even recent history, suggests he will get the teams he coaches to the playoffs. Even though it never resulted in the playoff success the team wanted, his Dallas Cowboys teams still won 12 games in three of his final four seasons before he was fired. That is a lot of wins. 

The Pittsburgh Steelers are also not necessarily a bad team. They win 10 games most years, make the playoffs most years, and have a history of winning Super Bowls. 

When you put those two things together, it should seem like a good match and a sensible hire by the Steelers. 

But it is not. It is not only an underwhelming hire by the Steelers, and one that goes against their historical method when it comes to hiring head coaches, but it signifies that the team is content with the mediocrity it has settled into over the past 10 years. 

The floor is high. The ceiling is low. This hiring does not change that. 

Mike McCarthy is a safe, low-risk hire by Steelers with low reward

The biggest source of frustration Steelers fans had with the end of the Mike Tomlin era is that the expectations seemed to be lowered from what they were when the organization was at its peak. 

This is a franchise that since 1972 has been one of the models for sustained success in the NFL, having played in eight Super Bowls since then and winning six of them. Throughout the tenures of Chuck Noll, Bill Cowher and the early stages of Tomlin's career the Steelers were not only always in the playoffs, they would regularly win playoff games. All three head coaches reached multiple Super Bowls. All of them won a Super Bowl. 

Playoff wins were the standard. 

Even if those wins did not produce a Super Bowl appearance, they still regularly advanced.

If they did not, it was seen as a failure. Or at the very least a major disappointment.

Simply making the playoffs was never the goal. 

But over the past decade, that seems to be where expectations have resided for owner Art Rooney II. He has repeatedly said that no season in which the Steelers make the playoffs is a bad season. He was willing to give Tomlin another season despite a seventh consecutive playoff defeat, with each of the past six coming by double-digits. The bar has been lowered to a "just be good enough" level. 

The hiring of McCarthy, a 62-year-old head coach who has won just one playoff game over the past seven seasons he was the head coach of a football team, seems to fall in line with that mindset.

The Steelers are not likely to bottom out under McCarthy or fall out of contention. They will very likely win their nine or 10 games in 2026 and quite possibly make the playoffs. But what is the ceiling beyond that? It is hard to see it changing. Especially if they bring back Aaron Rodgers for another season as the team's starting quarterback. 

Rooney seemed more content with just being better than the average team, or simply not being the Arizona Cardinals or the Cleveland Browns.

It is especially stunning in contrast to how the Steelers have operated in the past. While they do not hire a lot of head coaches, they have never been afraid to take a chance on unknowns. Noll was a defensive assistant with no prior head-coaching experience. Cowher was the same. Tomlin was the same and had been a defensive coordinator for just one year. 

There were candidates like that available this offseason. Los Angeles Rams defensive coordinator Chris Shula seemed like a leading candidate. As did Rams passing game coordinator Nate Scheelhaase. Even Miami Dolphins defensive coordinator Anthony Weaver seemed a strong candidate more in line with what has worked for the Steelers.

Maybe the chances of whiffing on one of those hires were higher. But the likelihood of a higher ceiling would have been there. The Steelers ignored that for the safe hire. They ignored that to stay slightly above average. That is their new standard.