Steelers' Mike Tomlin Reveals Who Taught Him To "Big Game Hunt" When Coaching

The Pittsburgh Steelers are not strangers to having loads of star talent, with and without egos. Managing these egos can be a major hassle, but it's nothing that Mike Tomlin is not used to at this point. He had to deal with the Killer Bs (Ben Roethlisberger, Le'Veon Bell and Antonio Brown) who all had seemed to have oversized egos that would divide the locker room at times. If you can deal with guys like them, you can deal with anyone. 

While appearing as a guest speaker for The Next Up conference, Tomlin talked about who taught him to not only handle the egos of his players, but to actually target the star players and coach them the hardest out of anyone on any of his teams. DeeLovesSports provided the content on X.

"[Bob Huggins] coached the best player the hardest. I think about the lessons that I've learned in coaching and when I was at Cincinnati, they were the number one team in the country. They had Kenyon Martin and other guys and I watched Huggs go at those guys. Go at Kenyon Martin in an effort to extract the best from him. It was a really cool thing to see, that component of coaching. Just talking about creating a culture and an environment and upholding the standard by making sure that everybody understood that the very best player was going to get coached."

There are definitely some lessons that can be learned and used across multiple sports, and that is one of them. While it's easier to manage egos and target the star player on a basketball team, you can still use that coaching style on a 53-man team, or even a 90-man team during training camp and preseason. Even in a high-level league like the NFL, players sometimes need reminders that they are not above the whole team. 

Steelers Can Still Use Huggins' Coaching Style Today

Tomlin was not even affiliated with Bob Huggins' basketball teams. He was an assistant coach with the Cincinnati Bearcats' football team for two years while Huggins coached basketball. Despite that, Tomlin did not hesitate to learn from someone that was seen as a true leader. Tomlin clearly still looks up to Huggins and respects him as a coach, despite his recent legal troubles. 

Tomlin continued on in his speech about and talked more about Huggins, and he talked about how he still goes "big game hunting" to this day. Even without all the toxic personalities that plagued the Steelers in the 2010s, he still goes after the top players on the team.

"It resonated with me. That's something that I took from him to be quite honest with you. I do it to this day. Sometimes it's easy to be hard on the backup. It's easy to make coaching points on a guy that's seemingly insignificant. Nah, I big game hunt. I checked in at work yesterday going at Minkah Fitzpatrick. That's what I do because if I'm working to bring the best out of Minkah, the people that's looking at that, they're going to fall in line."

Minkah Fitzpatrick is arguably the best safety in the NFL, but he still occasionally makes some mistakes. If Tomlin wants these young defensive backs to learn that his mistakes are not acceptable, he will go directly after him to make sure that everyone else understands. 

Even though the Steelers' offense is still perceived as being weak, the Steelers can't let the defense off easy. There is still a lot of coaching that needs to be done to make sure the offense can drive down the field and score points regularly, but the defense still can't rest.  Whether or not the offensive production is acceptable, the defense has to be ready to carry the load and shut down the opponent. 

What do you think about Tomlin praising Huggins and Tomlin using Huggins' coaching style to this day? Let us know in the comments.

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