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The Internet Is Losing Its Mind Over Retired NFL Coach Mike Tomlin Spending 12 Years Making A Very Intricate Minecraft City

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The Internet Is Losing Its Mind Over Retired NFL Coach Mike Tomlin Spending 12 Years Making A Very Intricate Minecraft City

Mike Tomlin, former head coach for the Pittsburgh Steelers and one of the most successful coaches in NFL history, loves Minecraft. He is completely obsessed with Minecraft. It turns out the NBC Football Night in America analyst has spent the last 12 years building a single Minecraft city, and he’s ready to show it to us all, and it might be the most spectacularly ordinary creation of all time. And the internet is loving it.

I have two favorite things about Tomlin’s Minecraft video: 1) It’s stupendously ordinary. 2) It’s really fantastically, astoundingly ordinary. And I mean both of those as compliments. I adore it.

Tomlin explains in his account’s first YouTube upload that he doesn’t have the “stick control” to play games competitively, but after watching his children play, he discovered Minecraft‘s Creative Mode, fell in love, and began to build. Various offspring have helped him with his project over the last 12 years, with Tomlin first seeing it as a lovely way to spend time with his kids, until eventually they grew out of it while he did not. It was his son Dino who finally convinced him to share this epic project with the world.

What makes this city and video so compelling is just how ordinary it is. It’s ordinary in a way that’s bordering on dangerous. The very first building Tomlin put up was a boutique hotel with appropriate lighting, employee work areas, and an adequate number of available bathrooms. He then moves on to residential housing, luxury apartment towers with individual aquariums, and a conveniently available CVS.

Making all this normality even more hypnotic is Tomlin’s monotone presentation of his city, obsessively describing the details on which he became “fixated” without a glimmer of excitement or vocalized enthusiasm. “I’m really lighting-conscious,” the former coach tells us at one point, as we see a glass ceiling above a hotel ballroom. “These are some other high-rises in the general area,” he later notes, adding, “I always liked this one here because of its proximity to the baseball stadium.” (He’ll “detail the baseball stadium in another episode.”)

“This might be a top 5 video of all time on YouTube,” reads one highly upvoted comment beneath the video, which has so far accrued 1.5 million views. “This is awesome, Coach!” comments the official NFL channel, sycophantically. “i’m honored to be here coach” notes the official Minecraft account. Perhaps more insightfully, another viewer adds, “The modern dad’s Model Train Track.”

Bedroom concepts

13 minutes in, after Tomlin has entered a sort of zen zone of seemingly endlessly describing “bedroom concepts” and how bathroom layouts “became something of an interest of mine,” there’s the most splendid abrupt cut as his son chips in, “Sorry to cut you off, but what do you think about the paintings in the game?”

“You know…I didn’t necessarily like the paintings,” his father explains, clearly not rising to the bait of what must surely have been a regular complaint in private. “But I just wanted to represent the interior design. There’s one painting that’s like a silhouette of a man, and that’s my favorite painting.” But thankfully Tomlin quickly brushes this disruption aside and gets back onto explaining the spacing of bedrooms in suites in another apartment complex, along with their open floor-plan living areas.

“I’m not going to bore you with too much detail,” says Tomlin in the straightest of tones after 15 minutes of bedroom planning descriptions. He then immediately follows this up by explaining why he chose the number of bedrooms in each apartment type. His son, who has to be trolling him, asks, “Did you want to talk about landscaping?”

This is but episode one of what could become one of the most compelling series ever uploaded to YouTube. The video’s final words are the tantalizing, “In the next episode we’ll take a look at something that I think you’re gonna find interesting, something that’s really cool, so stay with us.”

Honey, not now

Meanwhile another of Tomlin’s sons, Mayce, took to X to needle his father.

Then last night Tomlin appeared on Late Night With Seth Meyers to talk about the aftermath, where he described playing Minecraft as “therapeutic.”

This has all caused a lot of happiness as people delight in the joyful banality of it all, and we needed that.

 

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