Did you see any Steelers games from 1978 through 1983? Noll let Bradshaw fling the ball to the rafters nearly every play. As someone else mentioned Noll spent a lot of formative coaching years with Sid Gillman… the father of the pass-first offense. But having also cut his teeth with Paul Brown as a player (messenger guard) he was also realistic enough to use the best system for success at that time.He was too set in his ways, 1970s attrition football to go all in with a wide open pass first attack, I can't see it. even Cowher or Tomlin have never fully committed to pass happy, even with Ben's skills available to them.
He likely brought the offense back to earth after Bradshaw left only because the foolish Steelers management didn’t draft Marino when it could have. He recognized he had one dud after the other at the QB position (Stout, Woodley, Malone, Blackledge, Campbell, Brister). If the choice is letting a turd like one of those guys fire one bad INT after another, it was a better plan to hand the ball off more often even if it was boring and dubious in itself to do so.
I don’t know who deserves the blame for all those bad QBs, maybe Noll shared in those decisions along with their personnel guys … but if you see how bad all those QBs regularly played (and there are umpteen videos on YouTube from that Steelers Error, I mean Era, that show many examples), I think you’d agree he made the right decision to not try to go Bill Walsh with the offense in that decade.
By the end Noll was over the hill, out of touch, foolishly hired losers like Joe Walton as coordinator, and badly needed to be replaced. That much I’ll agree on. And his replacement Cowher does fit your accusation of a run-heavy ball control guy, for better or worse, likely the latter…. But that’s another story.
However, Noll definitely did not deserve the Ground Chuck reputation some seem to think he does. Super Bowl IX did not a career make.