Former NFL coach Mike Tomlin spent 19 seasons with the Pittsburgh Steelers and won Super Bowl LXIII, and now he's added another major accomplishment to his resume: becoming a Minecraft YouTuber.

The former coach gave football fans a little something different when he launched his new YouTube channel earlier this week. With a profile picture taken in front of NBC's Football Night in America logo, watchers probably weren't expecting Tomlin's first upload to see him confess how his love for architecture and family led him to work on a Minecraft city he spent 12 years building.

"You know, 12 or 13 years ago, when my kids were in middle school, they'd be in their room all weekend and have friends over. They were obsessed with playing this game, Minecraft, that I knew nothing about," he explained as his son and channel operator, Dino, sat in the background. "I got interested because I just was mesmerized by what could occupy their attention for such large periods of time."

He admitted he lacked the "stick control" to handle something like Minecraft's Survival mode but still managed to find enjoyment in Creative Mode. That's where Mojang's systems really started to click.

"I like to build," he said. "I've always had an interest in architecture, and so forth, so I started doing this creative city. It was a means of spending time with them. They participated all over this city. All my kids have buildings."

However, as his kids went off to high school and college, their interest in Minecraft waned. For Tomlin, it was just beginning. In 2026, after 12 years of building, the sandbox phenomenon has become therapeutic for the former NFL coach, and what he's built has the internet in disbelief.

"This is where it all started for me," Tomlin said as a blocky blue pond surrounded by detailed city buildings faded into view. His tour then begins with a closer look at a hotel. This one building features a fully fleshed-out interior with labeled rooms, a lobby, a ballroom, a pool, bathrooms, and more. Tomlin even factored in how lighting might affect the views in some of these rooms – and that's just one of many locations he's made.

"I was always inspired," he added. "I'd go places, and I'd see things and buildings, and I get inspired, I go home, and I work on it."

Tomlin then referenced the off-campus housing around universities that he recreated after dropping Dino off at college. The color, floor plans, and other memorable elements all came from these memories, with much of his creation also built around different bodies of water.

Tomlin stepped down as the Steelers' coach in January 2026, with today's video showing how he's spent at least some of the downtime since. He spent years in the NFL, but it's his work as a Minecraft YouTuber that has everyone talking today.

Mike Tomlin has been working on his Minecraft world for over a decade

It’s UNREAL pic.twitter.com/XWxu9zMinY

Aaron Rodgers: “CALL THE F*CKING PLAY!”

Mike McCarthy: “F*cking asshole”

*Loses to the Cleveland Browns*

Meanwhile, Mike Tomlin: pic.twitter.com/axnE3655rT

Steelers down 20 in a playoff game.

Mike Tomlin: pic.twitter.com/J4u56digNW

Mike Tomlin leaving the presser early to go finish building the Executive Spa in his Minecraft world pic.twitter.com/yHF2FOzeiZ

"I'm obsessed why is he genuinely a better builder than me," content creator @Krtzyy said.

"Mike Tomlin becoming a Minecraft YouTuber was not on my bingo card for 2026," one X/Twitter user said.

Tomlin signed off, promising to take a closer look at his city in future videos. He also teased plans to show off something that "I think you're going to find interesting." Despite being maybe the most creative celebrity gamer to come out of 2026, the ex-NFL coach isn't the only notable name to share their love for gaming in the last year. Obsession breakout Inde Navarrette garnered attention for her The Last of Us and Call of Duty streams a few months ago. Newly announced X-Men star, Samara Weaving, is also a big gamer.

Photo by Rich von Biberstein/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images.

I have spent the last three days scrolling through some of the most insane mod videos I've ever seen. Modders are taking games that have been decompiled with Claude, and mashing them up with other games. As the week has gone on, there have only been more clips of these mods pouring out on X/Twitter.

One person created a mashup of World of Warcraft and Call of Duty: World at War; another combined Escape From Tarkov with Skyrim. There’s even one that takes Insomniac’s Spider-Man and combines it with Batman Arkham City, where the player is able to swing around Batman’s turf.

These mods are everywhere online right now, though they thankfully haven’t filtered into modding websites like Nexus Mods yet. But, with the sheer volume of these mods and with how accessible Opus 5.5 is, it feels like it’s only a matter of time before the gates are fully torn down. And if that happens, it could change the face of the modding scene entirely.

Claude Opus 5.5 launched last week, promising cheaper tokens and more efficient code work. I'm sure that Anthropic meant for it to be used by professionals, but gamers have used it to create some of the weirdest mods I have ever seen.

Opus is a model that can power AI agents, which can be deployed to create entire games from the engine, to the art and enemy behavior. Brendan Jowett has a great video on YouTube of the model in action: He develops little slices of video games and compares them directly with the same tasks from OpenAI’s Astra 6 model. While the results of both are far from what you’d expect from a fully featured game, Claude’s new model has clearly come a long way.

The problem with the examples in Jowett’s video is that while the models are good at piecing together disparate parts of a game, enemy AI (lol) and art assets are lackluster to say the least. In one of the slices, a space combat sim, the space fighter flys at a diagonal angle, while moving in a straight line ahead, and shooting. In another slice enemies completely ignore the player character.

As good as Claude Opus 5.5 seems to be, it’s still lightyears away from developing something like a true mashup of Minecraft and Elden Ring from scratch. But the model doesn’t have to start from scratch.

The big, driving force behind a lot of these mods is decompilation, where people are pointing Opus at a game and letting the agent break it down to its source code (here’s a handy blog if you want to really get in the weeds). Just earlier today, we covered Halo: Combat Evolved being decompiled and ported to run natively in a browser. Once that step is complete, it takes little effort to take that source code and work huge swaths of games into other games as mods, and with very little input from the user.

Couple that with the relatively affordable tokens, and it shouldn’t be surprising that X/Twitter’s generally pro-AI users went wild with it, creating hundreds of mashups. And it doesn’t seem like it’s slowing down any time soon; what started off as a weird video that my boss sent me on Tuesday has now evolved to the point where I can’t even open X/Twitter without seeing a deluge of these mods.

The obvious problem with all of this is that these models are breaking open games developed by real people, getting the source code and then just mashing stuff together without consideration or permission from the original developers. That’s nothing particularly new – the modding scene is definitely no stranger to mashups, all the Thomas the Tank Engine mods are proof of that. However, this trend might be breaking into new territory, thanks to decompilation.

This could be another reason none of these mods have made their way onto any distribution platforms. Nexus Mods doesn’t outright ban AI-generated content, but it doesn’t let people use AI tools to upload content that they don’t have the rights to.

In a blog post from 2023, Nexus laid out its rules around AI generated content. The policy states that, “In order to prevent any issues with your mods, we encourage you to avoid using these tools unless you have explicit permission to use all the assets. This is particularly true for AI-generated voice acting but also covers images, models, code and anything else that you can use this technology to create.”

Every single one of these passthrough mods are using images, models, and code that the people generating them don’t have the rights to. But it’s only a matter of time until some platform holder allows these mods to be hosted, and I’m sure a massive legal battle will happen immediately afterwards.

Way before all of these Claude-authored mod videos started cropping up online, people had been creating mods by hand for years, typically out of pure love for the game. It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that a lot of mod authors aren’t fans of this phenomenon.

Mod authors have been expressing their frustration on X/Twitter as this has been happening. “I mod games and I'm not shy about the fact that I use AI to do it. I hate this bullshit ‘trend’. Pure slop, there's nothing creative about this at all,” kran27_ posted. “AI has a lot of potential in the modding scene, but the shit that's getting the clicks is this jingling keys bullshit.”

Kran wasn’t alone, with discountmodder ready to just leave the scene, saying, “Dude I'm really disappointed. If this becomes the permanent state of modding, this may be my last project. I don't wanna be involved in an AI slop-factory.”

I can’t escape the feeling that most of these mashups are born from people just playing with a new AI model and seeing what will happen, and I hope that this weird trend will die off soon. Modding is one of the best parts of PC gaming, and there is a lot of incredible content that people make just because they love a game. Some of the best games started off as mods, after all, and without them we never would have got the likes of Half-Life or League of Legends.

I hope that this is just a trend, rather than a sign of where the modding scene is heading. Fortunately, because these mods seemingly only exist to farm engagement on Twitter (at least so far), you don’t have to worry too much about them if you just want to start a new modded run of The Witcher 3 Remastered. If anything, it just means that if you want to avoid AI content, you need to pay even more attention to who you’re getting your mods from.