When Mike Tomlin retired as head coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers last year after 19 years on the job, he did so with one of the most successful records in NFL history: Two Super Bowl appearances, one win, and a nearly two-decade run of his team winning more games than they lost. And if you’re wondering what kind of highs can possibly match that kind of multi-year, highly competitive thrill ride, you need wonder no longer, because, uh, Tomlin’s a Minecraft streamer now. And a pretty good one!
Tomlin (who’s also now working as a sports analyst for NBC Sports) revealed his mastery of the block-based game when he launched his own YouTube channel last month, spurred on by his son Dino. As it turns out, Tomlin (who started poking at the sandbox game as a way to connect with his three kids, and then just continued poking at it after they all aged out of its demographics) has apparently been playing on the same Minecraft map for 12 years at this point, and was convinced by Dino to show the results to the world.
They are, to put it mildly, impressive: Tomlin, who plays in the game’s Creative mode, without all those pesky monsters or resource collection to worry about, notes early on in his first video that he’d always aspired to be an architect, and has clearly taken to Minecraft as, essentially, a sophisticated Lego simulator of sorts. His city is full of beautifully crafted buildings, sports stadiums, and, yes, a CVS or two, because what’s modern urban living without a pharmacy?
It’s not just that the video is exceptionally adorable—although it is—but how seriously, gently, and happily Tomlin (a man whose job, again, was to manage some of the most alpha personalities on the planet for almost 20 years) presents it all. There’s something incredibly soothing about hearing this guy talk about how he worried there were enough bathrooms in his public facilities, or expressed mild disgruntlement at the aesthetics of Minecraft‘s sometimes silly paintings. The whole thing is incredibly chill—which might explain why more than 2 million people have watched it in the two days since Tomlin and his son posted their first video online. (Of course, not everyone has been quite so complimentary; per CBS Sports, several of Tomlin’s old NFL rivals have posted jokes about him this weekend, while at least one analyst suggested that the Steelers’ playoff win rate dropped from 62.5 percent to 25 percent after Tomlin began constructing his magnum opus.)
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