Is there a chance Mike Tomlin will coach his final game with the Steelers on Sunday in Buffalo, assuming the heavily favored Bills win their playoff game?

I didn’t think that was possible until a couple of prominent NFL insiders talked about Tomlin’s future this week.

“People in Pittsburgh want him fired — they’re not firing Mike Tomlin,” Adam Schefter said on ESPN. “Here’s the thing that interesting: He’s got a year left on his contract. And there are some people around the league who believe that Mike Tomlin could decide eventually to take some time off like Sean Payton did. Maybe take a year off. … Mike Tomlin gets to dictate what happens here, not the Pittsburgh Steelers. They’re not firing him. He’s staying on, but he’s staying on if he wants to. But if he decides that he’d like to walk, well, that’s a different subject.”

Jay Glazer, who might be closer to Tomlin than anybody in the media, did not shoot down Schefter’s report.

“Mike Tomlin, a couple weeks ago, people were asking for him to be gone. Are you kidding me people?” Glazer said on Fox. “He’s never had a losing season. So, Mike Tomlin, it will be his choice if he goes back to the Steelers or not. It will be his choice.”

I agree with Schefter and Glazer that Tomlin won’t be fired, much to the chagrin of many in the Steelers’ fan base. Art Rooney II has never even hinted at any dissatisfaction with Tomlin’s work. I’m guessing he thinks Tomlin did a tremendous job this season, getting the team to the playoffs with a 10-7 record despite having to use three quarterbacks and missing Cam Heyward and Minkah Fitzpatrick for big chunks of the season. I’ll be surprised if he doesn’t offer Tomlin a one-year contract extension, maybe even two years.

But the speculation about Tomlin deciding to move on from the Steelers? That seems reasonable. I won’t scream and yell if Tomlin gets an extension — I still think he’s a really good coach — but I certainly wouldn’t mind if the two sides split. It’s easy to think an amicable divorce would be beneficial for both.

A new challenge with a new team would bring out the best in Tomlin. If the Steelers lose in Buffalo as 9.5-point underdogs, they will fail to win a postseason game for the seventh consecutive season. They might not win another for quite a while because they have no franchise quarterback on their roster.

A new leadership voice would benefit the Steelers. Their marriage with Tomlin has lasted 17 years, an eternity in the NFL. Hall of Fame coach Bill Walsh once said no coach should stay longer than 10 years with one team, that the coach’s message gets tired and stale.

Schefter suggested a couple of potential landing spots for Tomlin — the Washington Commanders and the Los Angeles Chargers.

“He’s from Washington [D.C.]. His wife loves Los Angeles,” Schefter said. “Maybe one of [those teams] wants to lob a call into the Steelers to see if they could wind up doing something with them.”

The idea of trading Tomlin makes sense for the Steelers — they could get something valuable in return for allowing him out of his contract — but it seems rather impractical, at least to me.

It seems much more likely that Tomlin will take a year off and then have his choice of NFL jobs as a coveted free agent before the 2025 season.

The networks would race each other to hire Tomlin as a broadcaster for huge money for the 2024 season.

“I mean, he’s got a language all of his own that everybody can understand,” long-time “Sunday Night Football” executive director Fred Gaudelli told media reporter Richard Deitsch in June 2021. “He’s got a really expressive personality. You’d want him in the studio so you could see him more, but I think he’d be equally good on a game. If you said to me you can take one guy out of the league right now, it’s not even a hard call. It’s Mike Tomlin.”

Tomlin has said many times that he is a football coach and that he has no interest in television. But people can change, right? I never thought Bill Cowher would leave coaching for good when he resigned as Steelers coach after the 2006 with one year left on his contract. But he went to CBS and never left.

I could see Tomlin behind a microphone for the 2024 season before making a grand return to the NFL in 2025. The more I think about it, the more I like the idea.