The Steelers are at the UPMC Rooney Sports Complex, informally known as the South Side facility, now into the regular season. It’s where they otherwise train all year round, and the facility that Burt Lauten insists everybody refers to by its full name.
There are still unsettled questions that need answering, even deep into the regular season. They entered the process with questions in the starting lineup, in scheme, and elsewhere, but new problems always arise that need to be resolved.
Even questions about who’s starting and when may not have satisfactory answers in their finality, as midseason changes are certainly quite possible, for some positions more than others. We’re also feeling out how the new coordinator posts—or posts in new contexts—end up playing out.
There’s never any shortage of questions when it comes to football, and we’ll be discussing them here on a daily basis for the community to “talk amongst yourselves”, as Linda Richman might say on Coffee Talk.
Question: What is the opinion of Matt Canada among the team’s offensive players?
There was some shoddy ‘journalism’ going around yesterday, in which one reporter made the claim that he believes if a straw poll were taken of the offensive players on the team, then they would vote to have offensive coordinator Matt Canada fired. This was after having already walked backed previous comments from which it was easier to infer that any player had actually said anything to that effect.
Of course no player is going to come out and say anything like that, and it’s ethically dubious to even run with the story as it was run. But that’s not to say it’s a radical notion that at least some players on the team might not be entirely satisfied with how things are set up.
And so as inspired by this particular story, I propose today that we discuss Matt Canada and his reputation among his own players in the locker room, those who have to answer to him directly—and perhaps vice versa.
What do they think of the system that they’re running, and I mean really think? Not just what they say in the media. Would a straw poll of players really reveal the consensus opinion that Canada should be fired? We can’t possibly know whether or not this is true, and many will be inclined to believe it because they themselves want him to be fired, and we more easily believe things that we want to be true or that we are inclined to favor.
This is not a question that is set up to be answered, to repeat the obvious. It’s being presented for discussion purposes, and what the potential answers mean. Do Canada’s players really buy into his system and accept that things will work out if they push through the growing pains?
Conversely, if the players are genuinely dissatisfied with what Canada is doing and they don’t believe that they can have success running it, what does that mean? How is it going to manifest itself on the field?
