Cowher's Future in Pittsburgh Uncertain

Retired Steelers running back Jerome Bettis and coach Bill Cowher pose for a picture with the Lombardi Trophy following a White House ceremony to honor the Super Bowl XL champions (6/3/06).

A month before camp, Cowher's future in Pittsburgh uncertain

By The Associated Press
Thursday, June 29, 2006

PITTSBURGH - Coach Bill Cowher will take his 15th Pittsburgh Steelers team to training camp in one month. The question now is whether there will be a 16th season - or a 17th or an 18th.
With the Super Bowl champions' vacation time dwindling down to weeks instead of months, Cowher - who has two seasons left on his contract - has not signed an extension despite offseason talks between the team and his agent.

Asked recently how many more years he would coach the Steelers, Cowher said, "I'm taking it year by year" - an answer he had never given before.

Previously, the Steelers have never allowed the man with the third most victories among active NFL coaches go into any season with fewer than two seasons left on his contract. They signed him to an extension even after the Steelers missed the playoffs for three consecutive seasons from 1998-2000, and Cowher's next team went 13-3 and reached the AFC championship game.

But, for the first time in the career of only the second Steelers coach in the last 37 years, circumstances are different.

First, the Steelers have won the Super Bowl that had eluded them for 26 years and Cowher for the first 13 seasons of a career that saw his teams reach six AFC championships game before he won the NFL title.

Cowher had long called not winning the Super Bowl "the void" that had always been there in his career and now it's gone.

Second, Cowher - one year away from age 50 - has begun to show signs that he might be getting weary of the nearly year-around grind of being an NFL coach and is looking toward retirement.

Cowher has always said he planned to coach the Steelers until his three daughters graduated from high school. Two daughters, Meagan and Lauren, are now varsity basketball players at Princeton, while the third, Lindsay, will be a high school sophomore.

However, unlike her two older sisters, Lindsay apparently will not finish her scholastic basketball career at Pittsburgh's suburban Fox Chapel High School. Cowher and wife Kaye recently purchased, through a trust set up by his agent's company, a $2.5 million home in Raleigh, N.C.

Cowher's wife and youngest daughter apparently plan to live there this fall so Lindsay can attend school and play basketball there. Bill and Kaye Cowher both graduated from North Carolina State and have long planned to live there after Cowher's coaching career ended. They also own a summer home on the North Carolina coast where they were staying the week of quarterback Ben Roethlisberger's motorcycle accident.

While the Cowhers purchased the home last fall, news of the transaction did not break until after the Steelers won the Super Bowl. It caught the Steelers by surprise, since Cowher had not given any signs of moving from the $900,000 home in Pittsburgh that he bought shortly after being hired in 1992.

With a big new house located out of state and no new contract, Cowher may be looking beyond Pittsburgh and the Steelers. And what the Steelers don't know is if Cowher might be inclined to coach a team other than theirs, perhaps after he tried retirement for a year or two in his early 50s and decided he wanted to coach again.

Also, the Steelers likely must pay substantially more for a coach than they ever have before if they are to re-sign Cowher. His current contract is worth about $4 million, but Seahawks coach Mike Holmgren's recent deal raised the bar for upper-tier coaches to the $7.5 million to $8 million range - about double what the Steelers are paying Cowher.

The Steelers have the same policy with coaches as they do players, and that means no contract talks once a season begins. Should Cowher not get an extension before the Sept. 7 opener against Miami, the Steelers face the possibility of going into the next offseason with Cowher in the final year of his contract.

Team president Art Rooney II has said only that the Steelers want to get a new deal done before the season starts.

With a 141-82-1 record, Cowher ranks 14th in NFL history in coaching victories.