Mike Tomlin Explains What He Learned from Bob Huggins

Pittsburgh Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin took something from the basketball Hall of Famer.

Pittsburgh Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin is one of the most successful coaches in all of sports. In his 17 years as a head coach, he's never had a losing season and he has former West Virginia head men's basketball coach, Bob Huggins, to thank for it.

Okay, maybe that's a little bit of a stretch, but he did learn something from the Hall of Famer early on in his career. At "The Next Up" coaches initiative in North Carolina, Tomlin shared that message.

"He 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...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."

Mike Tomlin Spoke on What he Learned from Basketball Coach Bob Huggins & How he applies it today! @NextUpCoaches @LeVelleMoton pic.twitter.com/GsSQHafFuY

— DeeLovesSports (@DeeLovesSports) May 31, 2024

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