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: Who is more responsible for the current state of the Steelers’ offense, quarterback Mitch Trubisky or offensive coordinator Matt Canada?
Arguably the two biggest factors in what a team’s offense looks like—or maybe not even arguably, at least in most situations—are who the quarterback is and who the offensive coordinator is. Right now, the Steelers’ offense has both a quarterback and an offensive coordinator fielding a lot of criticism about their respective roles in the underperformance of the unit.
This is a question that’s been brewing all season, so I figured it was just time to come out and ask it: who is more responsible for the way the offensive is performing, or underperforming, through the first three games of the season?
Is it the concepts and designs and play calling of Matt Canada, or is it the execution of Mitch Trubisky? Now it goes without saying that there’s plenty that we can’t know without being in the locker room and in meetings and on the sidelines, but based on what we can observe, which do you see being the larger issue of the two?
Trubisky has been far from great, regardless of whatever grades Pro Football Focus or any outlet might be slapping next to his name, but we’ve seen the limitations of Canada’s play calling as well, and his mid-week answers to questions don’t exactly leave you feeling confident anything’s going to change.
For example, both Trubisky and Canada have given conflicting responses to questions about how to get the deep and intermediate portions of the middle of the field more involved in the passing game. Canada said the solution is to throw the ball there. Trubisky said it’s to call plays that puts the ball there.
One wonders at what point there will be a shakeup of some kind, whether it’s Trubisky being benched for Kenny Pickett or Canada having some authority taken away from him, if not both, but if things don’t start getting better, it could certainly happen at some point.
