Mike Tomlin's Pittsburgh Steelers Offense Takes New England Patriots' Mentality

Weeks after his team took Super Bowl 43, head coach Mike Tomlin was laying the groundwork for the next great generation of Pittsburgh Steelers.

As the league's landscape continued to evolve, so was the need for Tomlin's Steelers to follow suit.

The NFL was different game in 2009 than it was when former head coach Bill Cowher's Steelers won Super Bowl 40 in early 2006. Still, today, the NFL is contrasting to the year Tomlin's squad achieved a Lombardi Trophy in Super Bowl 43 in early 2009.

Today's NFL is about creating matchup disasters with subpackages. For better or worse, it's become a weekly shootout.

A rebuild for Pittsburgh seemed imminent and necessary during that 2009 offseason. Even as the team would go to the Super Bowl the following season (2010), aging veterans on both sides of the ball like Hines Ward, Aaron Smith and Casey Hampton to name a few, the core of the Steelers for three Super Bowl appearances in six years, would eventually have to be replaced.

Mike Tomlin led his team to a Super Bowl 43 win in just his second season as head coach.

So, what did Tomlin desire for his offense? Caught in the "Tomlinisms" and coach talk often associated with a typical press conference during the 2009 season, he laid a few key quotes that were buried as the years went by.

"You study a team like New England, and they walk into a stadium offensively, and week to week they can be whatever they choose to be,"Tomlin told Ed Bouchette of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in a Sept. 23, 2009 article. "They can beat you in three wides, four wides, three tight ends, and it makes them very difficult to prepare for and ultimately beat."

Flash to today, the team is earning high praise on the offensive side of the ball, where it seems like the long turnover of a championship-caliber team may finally be bearing fruit. That after two, long torturous seasons of...8-8 football. Oh, Pittsburgh fans, why must we bear such pain?

Offensively, the Steelers are well on their way to becoming that ideal image, that Patriots image Tomlin swooned over in 2009. The 2014 version is executing with the ball in a variety of ways, able to attack teams with a devastating power counter run game or with a record-breaking aerial assault. Or, in many cases, both at the same time.

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Mike Tomlin's Pittsburgh Steelers Offense Takes New England Patriots' Mentality