As the coach of one of the NFL’s most successful franchises, the Pittsburgh Steelers, for nearly two decades, Mike Tomlin was charged with building championship-caliber teams.
In his free time, Tomlin was building something different: an elaborate cityscape in the video game “Minecraft.”
On his YouTube channel on Wednesday, Tomlin revealed part of that map, which he said he had been working on for more than 12 years. Within four hours, the episode had been viewed more than 334,000 times. By the next morning, that total had doubled.
“I’ve always had an interest in architecture and so forth,” Tomlin said in the video, which has amassed over 900,000 views. “And so I started building this creative city.”
Tomlin may have been perfecting the map for more than a decade, but his hobby had only become public three weeks earlier.
The 54-year-old stepped down as the Steelers’ coach in January after 19 consecutive winning seasons, which included two Super Bowl victories. As his debut season as a broadcaster for NBC’s “Sunday Night Football” began last month, Tomlin revealed in an interview with Craig Melvin that his passions, in fact, ranged beyond football.
Watching his then-young children spend hours playing “Minecraft” had inspired him to see what all the fuss was about. As they became teenagers and went off to college, their interest waned.
Not Tomlin’s, though.
“More than anything, it was therapeutic for me,” Tomlin said. “So, mindless entertainment. I’m not a big TV watcher. It allowed me to detach from the realities and the pressures of life.”
With the Steelers, Tomlin was known for unique sayings referred to as “Tomlinisms.” In 2020, he famously wouldn’t allow Covid restrictions to be used as a hardship, saying, “We do not care.” So it stunned some football fans last month to hear that what Tomlin privately did care so much for was a video game that is immensely popular with elementary-age kids.
Since its creation in 2009, “Minecraft” has become the bestselling game of all time, with more than 300 million copies sold, Microsoft said in 2024, and has since spawned a popular movie.
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 beyond. Some players build fantasy worlds where building physics don’t apply.
Players often build in multiple maps. Tomlin stuck to just one, however, preferring to build what appears to be a midsize city centered around bodies of water and with a dense urban core that includes sports stadiums, high-rises and a PNC Bank. The map showed hills and wooded suburbs.
In other words, not all that dissimilar to … Pittsburgh.
Narrating his tour with a matter-of-fact delivery not out of place from his past weekly news conferences, Tomlin used verbiage a real estate developer would approve of while saying that his map all began by creating a bay. Then he built a boutique hotel, complete with an executive spa, therapy rooms and an “appropriate number of public restrooms.” Showing off a glass ceiling over the hotel’s conference room, Tomlin called his design philosophy “lighting-conscious.”
Mike Tomlin says he's been working on a city in 'Minecraft'
Some commenters online questioned how much time Tomlin had 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 tryna win super bowls and coach T was on minecraft building cities 😭.”
More so, the reaction tended to center on Tomlin’s dedication to realism.
“Never thought I’d watch Mike Tomlin discuss lighting and basement speakeasies,” one YouTube commenter said. On a Reddit thread devoted to Tomlin’s build, one person wrote, “When Mike Tomlin first mentioned this whole thing, I was NOT expecting such an impressive city!”
Tomlin built buildings by themes, intentionally placing them next to rivers, bays and lakes he carved out of the map. His designs are intricate; residential buildings included different floor plans for the penthouse than the lower floors. Kitchens featured islands. Bathrooms featured plants. Bedrooms included paintings. The living spaces in one high-rise, which was down the street from buildings named “CVS” and “7-Eleven,” wrapped around a central aquarium. Nearby were stadiums for professional soccer and baseball.
At some point, Tomlin acknowledged becoming “obsessed with rooftop penthouses” with great views. That focus then spilled over into designing spaces for indoor and outdoor entertainment, balconies, home offices, and his-and-hers bathroom concepts.
“Find someone who loves you like Coach Tomlin loves a Jack & Jill bathroom,” another YouTube commenter said.
It was one of many jokes sparked by Tomlin’s “Minecraft” devotion. Yet, perhaps it shouldn’t have been all that surprising. In “Minecraft,” Tomlin seems to have found similarities to the mixture of creativity and discipline required in the world of the NFL. Coaches’ lives abide by a rigid structure of practices, games and the offseason calendar. They conceive exotic play designs and defensive coverages, then put them into practice by obsessing over details and precision.
“Football is an emotional game played by high-energy men who are really emotional,” Tomlin said in 2022. “They need to hear a steady voice. They need to hear consistency in messaging in belief, and so it’s my job to exemplify that.”
Tomlin was praised as a coach for his never-too-high, never-too-low personality. The kind of person whose idea of winding down after a long day in the spotlight might include ensuring his “Minecraft” map had a “certain density,” as he said. When Tomlin dropped his son Dino off at college, he said he was inspired to re-create the look of off-campus housing into his own city.
“Bro I used to come home sometimes and my PlayStation would just be 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 tall, beige building labeled “Trump Tower.”
“Not an endorsement,” a chyron said on the video. “This build is (circa) 2015… We didn’t think he would win. Twice.”
Its penthouse had an “unbelievable open floor plan,” Tomlin said approvingly.
He promised his roughly 76,000 YouTube subscribers more episodes.
“I’ll give you a tour of this aquarium at some point,” he said. “It’s crazy.”
