Never had a losing season.

This is the mantra of those fully in support of Pittsburgh Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin. Never had a losing season. The touchy work in that sentence is losing. You can take the term very literally or you can look at it through a more critical lens, that is where things get messy.

Tomlin and his Steelers find themselves in the playoffs for the 10th time in his 15-year tenure as head coach. His supporters point to this as a key for why Tomlin is a great coach. His critics look at the team’s playoff record under Tomlin and view it as empty success without a payoff. Some even look at the team making the playoffs this season only due to an expanded playoff pool.

Tomlin’s entire career has raised this question. Is the team really great or just barely great? And as a follow up, does this continued trajectory lend itself to steady or improvement or a stagnant team? Personally, I tend to lean to the latter. Being just good enough to sneak into the playoffs in most cases could be doing just enough to keep the team from implementing a real offseason approach to building a strong team.

Oh and to come back around to the idea of Tomlin never having a losing season. Many fans feel a Super Bowl or at least a deep playoff run constitutes a losing season and they might not be wrong. A better way to describe Tomlin’s legacy at this point could be, “never had a sub-.500 season” if we are being more accurate. Would anyone look at last season as anything but a miserable disappointment? I can’t characterize it as a winning season despite the regular-season record.

But I want to hear from the fans. Where do you stand on Tomlin’s greatness as the team prepares to square off in the playoffs with a team that beat them by 26 points less than three weeks ago? Let us know in the comments below.