When the Steelers Hired Three Coaches — In One Season

As Mike McCarthy takes over as coach of the Steelers, sportswriters across the country remarked about the Steelers’ “unprecedented stability” with just four head coaches in 57 years, “unmatched by any NFL franchise in the Super Bowl era.”

Well, sports fans, it wasn’t always that way. In fact, in the early years, the opposite was true, with a revolving door of coaches and characters that once included the Steelers suffering through three head coaches in the same season.

For the team’s first eight years, they weren’t even the Steelers. When Art Rooney founded the team in 1933 and until 1940, they were called the Pirates. For that first season in 1933, Rooney hired Jap Douds, a Pittsburgh native who played football at Washington and Jefferson. After a 3-6-2 season, Rooney replaced Douds in 1934 with Luby DiMeolo, whose chief qualification was that he played football at Pitt with one of Rooney’s brothers.

After a 2-10 finish in 1934, Rooney began to take a more serious approach. He replaced DiMeolo with Joe Bach, who had played football at Notre Dame under Knute Rockne and was on the 1924 team that won the Rose Bowl and the national championship.
When Bach resigned after two years because he didn’t like the stress of coaching pro football, Rooney hired the notorious John “Johnny Blood” McNally, once described as “more myth than man.” McNally was both a great player and a great drinker, with Rooney later recalling what one of the players had said: “This is the only team I’ve been on where the players worry about the coach instead of the other way around.”

After Blood drank his way out of the job in his third year, with four games left in the 1939 season and the Steelers at 0-7, Rooney hired Walt Kiesling to finish out the season. Kiesling was a powerful guard with the Duluth Eskimos in the early days of the NFL and a future Hall of Famer, who had been an assistant coach under Johnny Blood. Kiesling finished the season as interim coach, staying on to coach the team in 1940. Which gets us to the infamous 1941 season.

The Steelers began the 1941 season with Bert Bell in the job. Bell had been a part of a Rooney deal that almost cost Pittsburgh its Steelers, when Rooney, faced with a financially struggling franchise, sold the team to Boston playboy Alexis Thompson.
With half of the money from the sale, Rooney bought a major interest in the Philadelphia Eagles and became co-owner with Bell. Rooney and Bell then proposed a swap with Thompson, in which he would take over the Eagles, since he wanted a team closer to New York, while Rooney and Bell would run the Steelers franchise. When Thompson agreed, a relieved Rooney asked Bell to coach the Steelers.

After a disastrous pre-season and losses in their first two games, Bell, who would become the NFL’s commissioner in 1946, told Rooney that in the best interest of the team and its fans, he was stepping down as coach and would stick to “the business end of the cooperation.” To replace Bell, Rooney decided to offer the job to Buff Donelli, then the football coach at Duquesne University. Donelli agreed, as long as he could continue coaching at Duquesne. Donelli proposed spending his mornings coaching at Duquesne and the afternoons coaching the Steelers.

The arrangement worked out perfectly for Duquesne. They would go undefeated at 8-0, and finish eighth in The Associated Press football poll. The arrangement worked out less perfectly for the Steelers, who went a perfect 0-5 under Donelli, who then resigned so that he could go on a West Coast trip with his Dukes.

Kiesling agreed to return and finish out the chaotic 1941 season as the third Steelers coach. He stayed on the next year, leading the team to a 7-4 record in 1942 — their first winning season since they began play in 1933. In 1943, he became the Steelers’ co-coach when, because of the shortage of players during the war, they merged with the Eagles, and he again served as co-coach in 1944 when they merged with the Chicago Cardinals. A frustrated Kiesling stepped down before the 1945 season and was replaced by his assistant coach, Jim Leonard.

After the three-coaches fiasco of 1941 and the ensuing Kiesling years, Rooney pulled off his greatest coaching coup in 1946 by hiring Jock Sutherland, who had won four national championships with Pitt, before he resigned after a dispute with Pitt’s administration. Sutherland brought respectability to the Steelers and hope to Steeler fans, but after only two seasons with the Steelers, he died of brain tumor.

Rooney replaced Sutherland with assistant defensive coach John Michelosen, who lasted four years, but frustrated fans by using the outdated single-wing offense. He was replaced by the returning prodigal Joe Bach, who instilled a new Steelers T-formation attack. When Bach stepped down again after two years, he was replaced by Kiesling a final time, to the dismay of Steeler fans, who saw Kiesling, at this point, as nothing more than a Rooney crony.

When Kiesling stepped down after the 1956 season, Rooney, at Kiesling’s urging, made the most impressive and long-lasting hiring of a coach since he bought the franchise in 1933. When Detroit Lions coach Buddy Parker abruptly resigned after the Lions lost the NFL championship to the Cleveland Browns, Rooney hired Parker to coach the Steelers.

When Parker first looked at the 1957 Steelers in training camp, he told Rooney, “You’ve got no quarterback, no runners, no line and no defense,” but he promised he would bring an NFL championship to Pittsburgh in five years. He traded for former Lions greats Bobby Layne and John Henry Johnson to help his offense, and former Colts great Big Daddy Lipscomb to help his defense, but, while the Steelers came close, they failed to live up to Parker’s prediction.

After eight years as Steelers coach, the longest tenure to this point in franchise history, Parker stepped down and was replaced by his assistant Mike Nixon, who lasted one year. In 1966, the transition from Art Rooney to his son Dan began with the hiring of Bill Austin, the defensive coach for Vince Lombardi’s Green Bay Packers. When Austin was fired after three losing seasons, Dan Rooney hired Chuck Noll, the defensive coach for Don Shula’s Baltimore Colts.

And the rest is history. Noll gave the Rooneys a championship decade in the 1970s with four Super Bowl wins and the claim to being NFL Royalty.