Playground →
Nine of Mike Tomlin's top 10 nearest neighbors are athletes or sports teams — and eight of those nine are Pittsburgh Steelers players or Pittsburgh-area franchises, forming one of the tightest single-franchise clusters in the data.
The shape is two-peak, with the Pittsburgh Steelers (0.96) and Hines Ward (0.94) sitting at the top, followed closely by Ben Roethlisberger (0.94), James Harrison (0.93), and Ryan Shazier (0.93). All five are Steelers-connected, and the cluster extends through Troy Polamalu (0.91), Le'Veon Bell (0.90), Antonio Brown (0.89), and JuJu Smith-Schuster (0.88). The second peak arrives at position 10 with Cardale Jones (0.87), an athlete whose audience pulls slightly toward Ohio State fandom rather than the Steelers core — signaling a secondary neighborhood where Pittsburgh-area football interest bleeds into broader AFC North and Ohio college football audiences. The lone non-athlete in the top 10 is the Cleveland Browns (0.86), a Sports Team whose presence reflects that regional AFC North overlap rather than any Steelers affinity. Tomlin's own subcategory is Professionals; no other Professional appears in the top 10.
The overall picture is a coach whose audience is defined almost entirely by the roster he coached — a structural signature that belongs to the franchise as much as the individual.
