New Steelers head coach Mike McCarthy defends stance to ban live tackling during training camp

For nearly two decades, a trip to Latrobe meant one thing around the league. Mike Tomlin ran one of the most physical training camps in football, and everybody knew it. That era is over, and the man replacing him is wasting no time putting his own fingerprints on how the Steelers practice.

Mike McCarthy told reporters this week that Pittsburgh will not do live tackling in camp, a first for a franchise that built its camp identity on physicality.

"I feel like we'll be able to get it done in other ways of training, particularly in our tackling drills and the team drills," McCarthy said, defending his stance. "Injuries are part of the game, and I think you've clearly got to do the best you can, and it's a judgment. You try to reduce risk."

McCarthy isn't just cutting reps and hoping the tackling holds up. He laid out how he wants to replace the contact, and it starts with the feet.

"We won't do live tackling. I've done live tackling in the past. Every drill's been evaluated. There's a GPS component behind everything we do. There's more stress that we need to apply to our training situations than just going to the ground," McCarthy said. "The footwork is the priority. It will always be about the feet in everything we do whether that's tackling, blocking, ball security."

For coaches at every level entering camp and considering doing the same, the veteran's stance who is now in charge of his third NFL team may be considered controversial, but worth hearing out. McCarthy is treating contact as a single input to manage, not the point of the drill itself, and he's leaning on GPS load data to decide where the real stress needs to live. 

His argument that will definitely have it's fair share of detractors, especially if they're unable to get ball carriers on the ground early on during the season, is that you can build a physical, sound tackling team by stressing footwork, leverage, and technique against dummies and in controlled team periods, then trusting that carryover on Sundays.

McCarthy is a Pittsburgh native taking over his hometown team after Tomlin stepped down on January 13 following a wild card loss to the Texans, ending a 19-year run that never produced a losing season. It's the first head coaching change in Pittsburgh since 2007, and McCarthy is only the fourth head coach the Steelers have hired since Chuck Noll in 1969.

He arrives with a résumé. McCarthy went 125-77-2 across 13 seasons in Green Bay and won Super Bowl XLV, beating these same Steelers 31-25 in February 2011. He followed that with five seasons in Dallas from 2020 to 2024, then took the 2025 season off before Pittsburgh called. His career mark sits at 174-112-2 in the regular season.

Whether the no-live-tackling approach travels the way McCarthy expects will play out over a long season. For now, he's betting that smarter stress beats more of it. 

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