Pittsburgh Steelers offensive coordinator Randy Fichtner now has some more help when it comes to coaching the team’s quarterbacks. On Wednesday, the Steelers announced that Matt Canada has been hired to be the team’s new quarterbacks coach.
Canada’s route to the Steelers coaching staff has included several stops at multiple college programs along the way. after starting off as a graduate coaching assistant at Indiana in 1994, Canada went on to coach at Butler, Northern Illinois, Wisconsin, North Carolina State, Pittsburgh, LSU and most recently Maryland, where he was the interim head coach in 2018.
throughout his college coaching career Canada has mostly been an offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach. In 2016 Canada was a finalist for the Broyles Award, an honor given to the top assistant coach in college football. That season he coached next door at the University of Pittsburgh and the team averaged a school-record 42 points per game with the school’s offense leading the nation in red-zone touchdown percentage (82%). Pittsburgh scored at least 28 points in all 12 regular-season games that season, including a 43-42 victory at eventual national champion Clemson.
Canada will now take over a quarterback room that currently includes the likes of Ben Roethlisberger, Mason Rudolph, Devlin Hodges, Paxton Lynch, and J.T. Barrett. The Steelers haven’t had a dedicated quarterbacks coach since Fichtner was promoted from that position to offensive coordinator in 2018. This past season, offensive assistant Matt Symmes help out Fichtner with the coaching of the Steelers quarterbacks.
During his end-of-the-season press conference, Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin admitted that he was indeed open to hiring a full-fledged quarterbacks coach during the offseason.
“In terms of a division of labor from a staff standpoint, a quarterbacks coach being one of them, that is things that I evaluate as I assess the staff and how we worked and the type of foundation we need to lay as we move forward to 2020,” Tomlin said a few weeks ago. “I am not opposed to that thought process, that discussion, that exploration”.
