Mike Tomlin’s Son, Mayce, Takes Us Inside His Dad’s Minecraft City

It was the premiere that spawned a thousand memes (pun intended).

Last Wednesday, former Steelers head coach and future Hall of Famer Mike Tomlin unveiled his sprawling and intricate Minecraft city, a surprisingly detailed passion project on which he has quietly doted for the last 12 years. His choice to share it with the world came at the urging of his sons, Dino, 25, and Mayce, 24, who insisted that the NFL community would find his metropolis not just endearing, but epic, an irresistible piece of relatability from one of football’s most unknowable and respected coaches.

The boys, of course, were correct. As of this writing, the first “episode” of Tomlin’s ongoing YouTube series boasts a whopping 3.2 million views across just four days, an impressive figure for a streamer, let alone a former football coach. On Sunday, NBC’s Football Night in America broadcast featured a Minecraft-themed news package, as well as Minecraft-ified versions of Tomlin and fellow hosts Maria Taylor, Devin McCourty and Jason Garrett sitting behind the analyst desk. Log on to X (formerly Twitter), and you might be bombarded with hundreds of memes and posts referencing both the coach and the video, either directly or indirectly, with a creative spin or right on the nose.

And as for the coach’s sons, well … they’re just trying to keep up with it all.

“I got two viral tweets right now,” Mayce, Tomlin’s middle child, said in a call on Friday. “My Twitter is almost unusable.”

Bro I used to come home sometimes and my PlayStation would just be gone. And I wasn’t in trouble😭😭😭 https://t.co/sVMg1SqxCs
— Mayce Tomlin (@maycetomlin) October 1, 2026

Mayce and his brother always believed the fan reaction to the city would be favorable—hoped so, anyway—but what they have experienced so far is beyond their wildest dreams. In fact, it might be more accurate to describe the response as overwhelming, even if it’s good overall.

“As somebody who grew up around it and in it, you get desensitized to how major of a project it is,” he said. “We’ve all been looking at it for 12 years. We were like, ‘Oh yeah, this is cool to us,’ but we did not expect the kind of reception that it’s gotten.

“We knew it would be some positive; we didn’t expect it to be overwhelmingly positive, which it has been for the most part. And so that’s been a pleasant surprise, but obviously, there’s a lot of things that come with that.”

For one: criticisms about Tomlin’s focus on the Steelers (or lack thereof) toward the end of his career. Since the city’s big debut, online sleuths have “connected the dots” between the coach’s burgeoning fascination with Minecraft and Pittsburgh’s slow descent from “perennial Super Bowl contender” toward “middling at best,” suggesting, in so many words, that perhaps Tomlin’s work on the PlayStation negatively impacted his record on the gridiron.

Mayce, however, believes that argument is as empty as the lobby of his dad’s painstakingly built boutique hotel.

“I don’t necessarily feel any way about it,” he said of the chatter. “I grew up around that, and so there was always another reason why we were losing. Regardless of what it was, it was always something, and he was always the blame. That’s leadership, though, and it’s not just a football thing; that’s any organization. … And so it is what it is. At the end of the day, I don’t wanna say people don’t matter, but opinions don’t matter.”

“I have not talked to my dad about it,” he continued, “[but] I would assume he feels similarly because he’s a lot less ear to the ground than I am. … So, you know, if I don’t care, he doesn’t even see it.”

That said, he still thinks the jokes are quite hilarious.

“Tell them to keep going,” he quipped, referring to the memes (of which there are plenty). “I think some of them are funny. I think a lot of them are funny, to be honest.”

To create the now-viral YouTube video, Dino Tomlin flew from Miami, where he lives with his brother, to film with his dad in New York. Somewhat of a streamer himself, the coach’s oldest son handled the technical X’s and O’s while Tomlin focused primarily on narrating his masterpiece. Once finished there, Dino then flew back down to Miami, where he and Mayce edited it all together.

“The flyover footage and the drone footage, … me and my brother had to do that. That was me with the controller, my brother with the start-stop, and we just flew around for two hours,” Mayce said. “‘Cause we knew [my dad] can’t move as well as we can with the controller, and so I was like, ‘Let me make sure the people are getting to see this the way that he wants to see it.’”

The city itself is a labor of love; the coach and his children—including Harley, Tomlin’s youngest—have spent hours upon hours building out the fake world’s robust subway system, or pouring over its pools and pathways (though they have so far declined to say exactly how many). As a result, the metropolis is full of tributes to the group’s inside jokes or favorite bits—so-called “Minecraft shenanigans,” as Mayce referred to them.

“There’s a bunch of little Easter eggs around this because, again, this is 12 years of our lives and so there’s a lot of different little Easter eggs on signs and billboards and things like that, which I’m sure we’ll get more into as the episodes go on,” he said. “But it’s fun for me to watch people discover them because I know they’re there, obviously.”

Although the game proved a great way for father and son to bond, Mayce also wisely insisted that Minecraft itself was probably the least important part of that relationship equation; all that actually mattered was that he and his dad were spending time together, in one form or another.

“For his job to be as demanding as it is, for him to be able to find time to just hang out with us, we always appreciated that,” Mayce said. “And a lot of the time, we weren’t even really focused on Minecraft. It would be Minecraft subconsciously, because we’d have a big project going on and it’d be all hands on deck, but at the same time, we’re talking about school, we’re talking about school sports and just life in general.

“And so when I think back to the project and building the city, I really don’t even remember building it at all. It’s more so just spending time with my dad and my brother, if that makes sense.”

Looking ahead, Episode 2 and Episode 3 are reportedly in the works (and Episode 2 is apparently a “banger,” according to Dino). Beyond that, though, Mayce declined to share additional details about the content coming down the pipeline.

“We’re trying to keep our cards pretty close to the chest right now,” he said when asked what his dad might reveal in the next installment. “The plan moving forward is to drop these, but in terms of the timetable and exactly what each episode will be, I’d like to keep the people guessing.”

Consider the excitement building.

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