Mike Tomlin sure sounds like a guy who isn’t going back to coaching

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Mike Tomlin is a sicko like the rest of us.

According to Devin McCourty, the former Steelers coach has been staying up to watch college football on Saturdays — Hawaii included — not out of any real attachment to the Rainbow Warriors, but simply because he can.

“The thing that sticks out to me so far is this dude is genuinely happy,” McCourty said of his new NBC colleague in a recent appearance on Kay Adams’ Up & Adams. “We got to MetLife Sunday, and everybody stays locally, really, and he was like, ‘I slept in this morning.’ And he just started smiling, and everybody else is kind of looking, and he’s like, ‘Man, I haven’t slept in in over two decades. I haven’t even thought about sleeping in.’ And you put it together, he said, ‘I stayed up late watching college football. I was watching Hawaii play. I didn’t really care. It was just, I could stay up and watch this college football game. Then I slept in. Now I’m coming to work.’ He said, ‘I don’t got no anxiety. I’m not worried about anything. I came here to have fun.'”

Tomlin did little to subdue the idea that he could eventually return to the sidelines when he told Cris and Jac Collinsworth on PFF’s preseason preview that he’s learned to “never say never,” while admitting he still craves the challenges of coaching and the disciplined “seven-day cycle” of preparing for a game.

“I know a lot of people are wondering when he’ll be back. They’re asking is their favorite team going to call him, and maybe, like, you never know,” McCourty said. “But I will say right now, he is having a blast. Like, just everything we’re doing, he’s soaking it in. He’s having fun. And I mean, he was damn good last week when we were in Seattle. Then we all sat there and watched his sit-down with John Harbaugh. It’s just so natural for him.”

But between NBC seemingly backloading his contract to give him a reason to stay and his own colleagues describing a 54-year-old who sounds more unburdened and content than he’s been in his entire adult life, Tomlin might be further from an actual return than ever before. He now has more time to do the things a 19-year head-coaching tenure never allowed, whether that’s attending a family reunion he hadn’t made since 1997, tending to a Minecraft city he’s been building for the last 12 years, or staying up until 3 in the morning watching the Rainbow Warriors just because he can.

He sounds at peace, but it only takes one desperate franchise to inevitably change that.