PITTSBURGH — The Pittsburgh Steelers will hire Mike McCarthy to be their new head coach, the team announced Saturday.

McCarthy, 62, will be the Steelers' fourth head coach since 1969. He succeeds Mike Tomlin, who stepped down earlier this month after 19 seasons with the team.

Team president Art Rooney II led the search for a new head coach along with general manager Omar Khan, who worked alongside McCarthy 25 years ago with the New Orleans Saints. Khan was a young front office assistant at the time, and McCarthy was a young offensive coordinator. Now they're reunited and will lead the Steelers into a new era.

McCarthy's hire is a bit off script for the Steelers. Under the late former team president Dan Rooney, the Steelers hired young first-time head coaches with defensive backgrounds.

Chuck Noll, Bill Cowher and Tomlin were all in their 30s and had been defensive coordinators before being hired by the Steelers.

Rooney, who helped his father with the searches for Cowher and Tomlin, went in an entirely different direction. McCarthy is now the second-oldest head coach in the NFL behind only Andy Reid. (Todd Bowles, Sean Payton and Jim Harbaugh also are 62 but younger).

Unlike Noll, Cowher and Tomlin, McCarthy came up through the NFL ranks as an offensive mind and is now the head coach of a third NFL franchise. McCarthy previously coached the Green Bay Packers and Dallas Cowboys, and his 174 career victories ranks 15 all-time in league history.

Rooney going off script shouldn't come as a complete surprise. The NFL has increasingly become an offense-centric league in the past two decades since Tomlin was hired, and the Steelers have not caught up with the times.

The Steelers struggled to score points in recent years, and McCarthy has a long track record of offensive success with the Packers and Cowboys. His teams led the NFL in scoring four times and were among the top-10 scoring teams in the league 14 times in his 24 seasons as an NFL head coach.

The Steelers plan to draft and develop a quarterback in the next two years, and McCarthy seems a strong choice to oversee that process given his work with Brett Favre, Aaron Rodgers and Dak Prescott. In the meantime, McCarthy's hiring could mean Rodgers returns to the Steelers for a second season because of his longstanding relationship with McCarthy.

Rodgers said the No. 1 reason he signed with the Steelers was because he wanted to play for Tomlin, but he spent 13 seasons with McCarthy in Green Bay and they won a Super Bowl together. McCarthy and Rodgers defeated the Steelers in Super Bowl XLV.

The Steelers have struggled to find a long-term replacement for Ben Roethlisberger since he retired in 2021. Rodgers could give the Steelers another year to bridge the gap until they're in position to draft a young quarterback they believe can lead the franchise forward.

The Steelers only conducted three in-person interviews during their coaching search. They interviewed former Miami Dolphins head coach Brian Flores on Tuesday, McCarthy on Wednesday and Dolphins defensive coordinator Anthony Weaver on Friday.

The Steelers conducted several more virtual interviews, including ones with Los Angeles Rams defensive coordinator Chris Shula and Rams passing game coordinator Nate Scheelhaase, both of whom could not be interviewed in person until Monday at the earliest under NFL rules. The league does not allow assistant coaches of teams coaching on conference championship weekend to interview in person until the following day.

But the Steelers decided they did not want to wait. Eleven days after Tomlin resigned, McCarthy becomes the 17th head coach in Steelers history.

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