What's More Likely: Mike Tomlin Returns To Coaching? Or Stays In the Media?

Cam Heyward took The Rich Eisen Show inside the moment Mike Tomlin walked away from the Pittsburgh Steelers, describing a locker room that had braced for uncertainty around its quarterback and its veteran defensive captain but never around its head coach.

"I thought this could be it for me personally," Heyward said of leaving the field that final night. "There's a lot of uncertainty there between Aaron, but I didn't think Mike T was going to be the first one to drop. Me, Aaron, and Mike T were all like in tandem walking off the field, and everybody was pretty upset about that game. The uncertainty with me, uncertainty with Aaron, those were at the top of my brain. And so the next day I go in the meetings and Mike T is saying I'm stepping down, and I'm just like, wait, what? I was in shock for a couple months."

Heyward said he has since spoken with Tomlin and made peace with the decision, and he expects his former coach to translate to television in a way that surprises no one who has spent time in his meetings. Heyward revealed Tomlin has been studying John Madden tape to prepare for the booth, a detail that prompted Heyward to push back. "Mike T, you don't need to study anybody," Heyward said. "You do things the right way. The level of detail he wants to put into it is going to be really special. I think he's going to have a lot of fun with it. His meetings, even when you saw in Hard Knocks, he just makes the room feel engaged. So if you apply that to TV, he's just going to kill it."

Rich, who has spent time in those same coach meetings as a broadcaster, agreed that Tomlin's pull is unusual. "I sit there and I think to myself, I would want to play for him," Rich said. Heyward did not flinch. "No doubt in my mind, anybody who's on the team would be nuts to not want to play for him. He's just about ball, man. He just talks about ball. And so now he's got a job where he talks about ball. He's going to be great at it."

Asked the show's signature what's-more-likely question, Heyward landed on media as the more probable long-term home for Tomlin, and offered a vivid reason. The Olympics are returning to American soil, and Tomlin's daughter, a second-team All-American gymnast as a sophomore, could be on the trials floor with her father in the booth. "That could cement it," Heyward said. "Father to daughter, watching her perform at the highest level. I don't think you get him to come back after that."