Strong As Tempered Steel

IN LATE JULY 2004 the Steelers made a controversial decision. Their coach, Bill Cowher, had two years left on his contract. He'd coached the team for 12 seasons, hadn't won a Super Bowl, was a little too famous for many fans used to his low-profile predecessor, Chuck Noll, and was coming off a 6-10 year—a season in which the ultimate twin embarrassments happened: losses at home to the team's two biggest rivals, Cleveland (by 20) and Cincinnati. Oh, the shame of it all. There were whispers about some players thinking Cowher didn't have the iron grip on the locker room that he'd had in the past.

Club owner Dan Rooney ignored common wisdom that Cowher had been given enough time to build a championship team and rewarded the coach with a two-year contract extension through 2007, meaning that after 12 Super Bowl-less seasons, the coach was assured of four more years of paychecks, regardless of the team's performance. Aside from a couple of places—Denver, maybe, and Green Bay—that's not likely to happen in any other NFL town. That summer at training camp Rooney said, "We don't like to change coaches. When you change coaches, you become like an expansion team. You start over. We think Bill should coach the team for years into the future."

In the next two years the Steelers won 31 of 38 games and their first Super Bowl since the 1979 season. In one of his press conferences before Super Bowl XL, Cowher said, "This organization is so good because there's no ego involved at the top."

Amen. Of all the reasons why the Steelers are in such good shape for the future—even with a dangerous, widening gap between big-market teams with lucrative stadium deals and smaller, family-run teams such as the Steelers—the ego factor, along with stability, are the biggest reasons why no Steelers fan should panic at a bad year. Today, the three men most responsible for charting the Steelers' course into the future are the 75-year-old Rooney, son and club president Art Rooney II and director of football operations Kevin Colbert, and none either needs or seeks media back-patting for jobs well done.

Dan Rooney's bedrock values about franchise construction are vital now, considering the major disparity in income between teams. They mesh well with Colbert's belief that a team has to be built through the draft, and that a coach must be willing to play young players early in their career and stick with them through tough times. Colbert's drafting has been exemplary—19 of his 20 picks in the first three rounds from 2000 to '06 are either Steelers or still playing in the NFL—but he also had a coach in Cowher willing to play the kids. Three of Colbert's first-rounders ( Ben Roethlisberger, Casey Hampton and Troy Polamalu) are among the team's stars. And when players get offered big money to move, such as safety Chris Hope in '06 to the Titans or Plaxico Burress in '05 to the Giants, the Steelers just reload through the draft.

"When we have an issue that's important to the team," Art Rooney said in July at Steelers camp in Latrobe, Pa., "we always ask the question, 'Does this fit with us?' Our core values revolve around the game and the players we bring onto the team. When we hired a coach this year, we said it had to be someone who fit our core values and who we'd be comfortable with for the next few years."

Speaking of controversial decisions, when the Steelers hired Vikings defensive coordinator Mike Tomlin to replace the retiring Cowher and be their third coach since the Nixon Administration, the decision upset quite a few of the locals. Two incumbents on Cowher's staff, offensive coordinator Ken Whisenhunt and offensive line coach Russ Grimm, were the runaway favorites for the job. But when the Steelers interviewed Tomlin—twice, for a total of nine hours—something clicked. That something was this: Rooney saw a bit of Noll in Tomlin. A quiet, charismatic teacher, Tomlin engendered immediate excitement in the two Rooneys. Whisenhunt and Grimm gave the Steelers bosses a good feeling, and they knew the franchise would be in solid shape with either man. But hiring Tomlin, while not the safe call, was the kind of risk the team felt good about making, a sort of dare-to-be-great decision even if it might backfire. They knew it could also result in a sixth Super Bowl win. And, perhaps, a seventh.

"We have to be true to ourselves and do what we believe," Art Rooney said. "Maybe it wouldn't work in other towns, but we're going to do business the way we've been doing it."

At camp in July, as dusk settled over the Laurel Highlands and the longtime Steelers summer home of Saint Vincent College in Latrobe, one of their scouts—a fellow by the name of Joe Greene—sat alone, smoking a cigar on a hill. Saying nothing to anyone, Greene sat overlooking Chuck Noll Field, the new football stadium on campus, lost in his thoughts. Time marches on. The Steelers march with it, with a wise eye on the past.