Bill Cowher, the Steelers coach who never went back to the sideline

Bill Cowher

Photo: Carlynton High School / Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	May 8, 1957 Crafton
Occupation	Footballer
Individual awards	Pro Football Hall of Fame · Super Bowl XL Champion · AP NFL Coach of the Year

For years, whenever NFL owners fired a head coach, Bill Cowher’s name came back into circulation, and every time it ended in the same place: a television studio in New York, where the jaw that Pittsburgh fans called “the Chin” now juts at a camera instead of a referee. That is the strange shape of his career. The coach who looked built for the sideline, all spit and fourth-down nerve, has now spent longer explaining football on The NFL Today than he spent running the Steelers, and nobody has talked him back.

The refusal makes more sense once you see where he started. He grew up in Crafton, a suburb a few miles from Three Rivers Stadium, the son of a man who had briefly sat in classes at Duquesne alongside the future Steelers owner Dan Rooney. Recruiters judged him too small to play linebacker. North Carolina State took the chance, and he repaid it by making every game personal, rereading the rejection letters from schools he was about to face. He once compared himself to Freddy Krueger: he wanted to be the other team’s worst nightmare.

Cowher, born on May 8, 1957, left NC State in 1979 with a degree in education and a single-season record of 195 tackles that the school still lists as its best. No team drafted him. He spent five seasons with the Cleveland Browns and the Philadelphia Eagles, mostly on special teams, a “bubble player” in his own phrase, one bad week from being cut. In Philadelphia one of his tackles broke the leg of a young Chicago Bears defensive back named Jeff Fisher, who later credited the injury with pushing him into coaching. The two ended up as rival head coaches and friends.

Marty Schottenheimer, his defensive coordinator in Cleveland, brought him onto the Browns staff in 1985, and Cowher took a pay cut to stop playing at 28. He coached special teams, then the secondary, trading lessons with a young New York Giants assistant named Bill Belichick, and followed Schottenheimer to Kansas City as defensive coordinator in 1989. Belichick beat him to the Browns’ head job in 1991. A year later the Rooneys hired Cowher, at 34, to replace Chuck Noll, the man who had won the franchise four Super Bowls.

What followed was fifteen seasons of a very particular football: a punishing defense, a running game and special teams treated as a third unit. He was named AP Coach of the Year after his first season, and Pittsburgh reached the playoffs in each of his first six years, something only Paul Brown had done before him. At 38 he became the youngest coach to that point to take a team to the Super Bowl, a 27-17 loss to the Dallas Cowboys in Super Bowl XXX. He gambled on fourth down when Schottenheimer would have punted, and during a 1995 game in Minnesota he stuffed a photograph into an official’s pocket to prove his side had eleven men on the field. The league fined him $7,500.

The canonized version tends to skip the Januaries. Cowher’s Steelers hosted five AFC Championship Games between the 1994 and 2004 seasons and lost four of them, two to the New England Patriots at Heinz Field; he has said those defeats hurt more than the Super Bowl loss. The late 1990s brought consecutive losing seasons and fan anger at his habit of spending first-round picks on linemen. Even the quarterback who finally carried him to a title was not quite his call: by most accounts of the 2004 draft, Cowher was leaning toward the tackle Shawn Andrews when Dan Rooney steered the pick to Ben Roethlisberger. A coach remembered for conviction won his ring partly because an owner overruled him.

The ring came anyway. Pittsburgh scraped into the 2005 playoffs as the sixth seed, won road games at Cincinnati, Indianapolis and Denver, then beat the Seattle Seahawks 21-10 in Super Bowl XL in Detroit, the first sixth seed to win the title and the first Steelers championship that did not belong to Noll. Eleven months later, on January 5, 2007, Cowher resigned, saying he wanted more time with his family. He was 49, with a record of 161-99-1 including the playoffs, eight division titles and ten postseason trips. Mike Tomlin took the job.

The family reason was not a cover story. His wife, Kaye, a fellow NC State graduate who had played professional basketball for the New York Stars alongside her twin sister, died of skin cancer in July 2010, at 54. The couple had three daughters, all of them basketball players. Cowher married Veronica Stigeler in 2014 and moved to New York full-time four years later. Along the way he took a cameo as the coach of the Gotham Rogues in The Dark Knight Rises, shot partly at the Steelers’ own stadium, and in 2021 published a memoir, Heart and Steel, written with Michael Holley.

Recognition arrived on his own set. In January 2020 the Pro Football Hall of Fame’s president, David Baker, walked onto the CBS pregame show and told him live that he had been chosen for the Centennial Class; the pandemic pushed the ceremony back, and in August 2021 he closed the night in Canton as its final speaker. NC State added him to its Ring of Honor two years later.

He is in his 20th season at CBS now, at a desk he shares with James Brown, Nate Burleson and two new arrivals, Russell Wilson and Kyle Long. His old team has moved on without him in the room: Tomlin stepped down in January after 19 seasons, and the Rooneys hired Mike McCarthy, only the fourth Steelers head coach since 1969. On October 25 Cowher used his airtime to defend Nick Sirianni, whose Philadelphia Eagles had lost four straight. “Give this guy a chance,” he said. “I hope it doesn’t take him three years like it took me to get back.”

That line is the closest thing to a self-portrait he offers. Cowher argues for patience because Pittsburgh once showed it to him, and he keeps arguing it from the studio rather than proving it again on a sideline. With the season running into January, the question the league has asked him for two decades will come round once more, and he will answer it on Sunday, on CBS, in a suit.

Tags: sports, athletes, NFL, American football, Pittsburgh Steelers, Bill Cowher, Super Bowl XL

Related People

Related People

Discussion