As coach of one of the NFL’s most successful franchises, the Pittsburgh Steelers, for nearly two decades, Mike Tomlin was responsible for building championship-caliber teams.
In his spare time, Tomlin was building something different: an elaborate cityscape in the video game “Minecraft.”
On Wednesday, on his YouTube channel, Tomlin revealed part of this map, which he says he has been working on for more than 12 years. In four hours, the episode was viewed more than 334,000 times. By the next morning, that total had doubled.
“I’ve always had an interest in architecture and stuff,” Tomlin said in the video, which has been viewed more than 900,000 times. “And that’s how I started building this creative city.”
Tomlin may have been perfecting the map for over a decade, but his hobby had only become public three weeks earlier.
The 54-year-old left his post as Steelers coach in January after 19 consecutive winning seasons, including a Super Bowl victory. As his first season as a broadcaster for NBC’s “Sunday Night Football” began last month, Tomlin revealed in an interview with Craig Melvin that his passions actually go beyond football.
Watching his young children at the time spend hours playing “Minecraft” had inspired him to understand what it was about. As they became teenagers and went off to college, their interest waned.
But not Tomlin’s.
“More than anything, it was therapeutic for me,” Tomlin said. “So, mindless entertainment. I’m not a big TV watcher. It gave me a break from the realities and pressures of life.”
With the Steelers, Tomlin was known for his unique lyrics called “Tomlinisms.” In 2020, he did not allow Covid restrictions to be used as a constraint, saying: “We don’t care.” So some football fans were stunned last month to learn that what Tomlin cared about so privately was a video game extremely popular with elementary-aged children.
Since its inception in 2009, “Minecraft” has become the best-selling game of all time, with more than 300 million copies sold, Microsoft announced in 2024, and has since spawned a popular film.
An open-world “sandbox” game, “Minecraft” allows users to build whatever their creativity desires using a variety of materials, from different types of stone and wood to much more. Some players build fantasy worlds where building physics don’t apply.
Players often build on multiple cards. Tomlin stuck to one, however, preferring to build what appears to be a mid-sized city centered around bodies of water and with a dense urban core including sports stadiums, skyscrapers and a PNC bank. The map showed hills and wooded suburbs.
In other words, it’s not that different from… Pittsburgh.
Narrating his tour with a matter-of-fact delivery not out of place in his previous weekly press conferences, Tomlin used verbiage a real estate developer would approve of while saying his map all started with the creation of a bay. He then built a boutique hotel, complete with an executive spa, therapy rooms and an “appropriate number of public toilets”. Pointing to a glass ceiling above the hotel’s conference room, Tomlin called his design philosophy “lighting conscious.”
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Mike Tomlin says he worked on a city in ‘Minecraft’
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Some online commenters wondered how much time Tomlin spent building while also working in the NFL, an industry known for its workaholic culture. Former Steelers running back Le’Veon Bell wrote, “We were trying to win Super Bowls and Coach T was building cities with Minecraft 😭.”
Even more so, the reaction tended to focus on Tomlin’s dedication to realism.
“I never thought I’d see Mike Tomlin discussing lighting and basement speakeasies,” said one YouTube commenter. On a Reddit thread about Tomlin’s construction, one person wrote: “When Mike Tomlin first mentioned all this, I was NOT expecting such an impressive city! »
Tomlin constructed buildings thematically, intentionally placing them next to the rivers, bays, and lakes he carved onto the map. His creations are complex; the residential buildings included different floor plans for the penthouse and for the lower floors. Kitchens featured islands. The bathrooms had plants. The rooms included paintings. Living spaces in a skyscraper, located down the street from buildings named “CVS” and “7-Eleven”, wrapped around a central aquarium. Nearby were professional football and baseball stadiums.
At one point, Tomlin admitted to becoming “obsessed with rooftop penthouses” with great views. This focus then extended to the design of indoor and outdoor entertaining spaces, balconies, home offices and his and hers bathroom concepts.
“Find someone who loves you like Coach Tomlin loves Jack & Jill toilets,” another YouTube commenter said.
It was one of many jokes sparked by Tomlin’s devotion to “Minecraft.” Yet perhaps this shouldn’t have been so surprising. In “Minecraft,” Tomlin seems to have found similarities to the mix of creativity and discipline required in the world of the NFL. Coaches’ lives adhere to a rigid structure of practices, games and off-season schedules. They design exotic play designs and defensive coverages, then put them into practice by obsessing over details and precision.
“Football is an emotional game played by very energetic men who are really emotional,” Tomlin said in 2022. “They need to hear a firm voice. They need to hear consistency of messages with conviction, and so it’s my job to illustrate that.”
Tomlin was praised as a coach for never being too high or too low. The kind of person whose idea for unwinding after a long day in the spotlight might include making sure his “Minecraft” map has “some density,” as he put it. When Tomlin dropped his son Dino off at college, he said he was inspired by the idea of recreating the look of off-campus housing in his own town.
“Brother, I would come home sometimes and my PlayStation was just gone,” one of Tomlin’s sons, Mason, posted on X. “And I wasn’t in trouble.”
At one point during Tomlin’s tour, he focused on a large beige building labeled “Trump Tower.”
“Not an endorsement,” one chyron said on the video. “This build is from (around) 2015… We didn’t think he would win. Twice.”
Her penthouse had an “incredible open floor plan,” Tomlin said approvingly.
He promised his approximately 76,000 YouTube subscribers more episodes.
“I’ll show you around that aquarium at some point,” he said. “It’s crazy.”
Gn sports
