Meet the new offense. Same as the old offense. At least that seems to be the message coming from the Pittsburgh Steelers lately, most recently and notably offensive coordinator Matt Canada. Speaking to reporters earlier this week about their impressive preseason performance, he made it clear that there was one key difference from what they did in 2022.
“We did all the things we did last year in that game, but it looked [better] with our ones”, he said, via the team’s website. “It was clean, it was good, it was sharp. Our execution was better. That’s the same thing that we’ve been talking about for a long time”.
An offensive coordinator is going to have a vested interest in claiming that everything about his offense is great and that it’s only the meddlesome players getting in the way of them scoring on every play, naturally. But it’s not like the players are disagreeing. TE Pat Freiermuth talked about it last week, even before the game, on the WDVE Morning Show with Randy Baumann.
“I think it’s sharper execution. I think last year we had the shots down the field and we had stuff to get the offense more explosive. I just think we weren’t executing it”, he said. “There’s a lot of factors into that, but I think the majority of it was the players not executing what they were assigned and not making enough plays”.
Again, you’re generally going to hear players blame themselves rather than their coordinators for the shortcomings of their unit. And let’s be honest, there were a lot of player faults to go around last year, not unsurprisingly given the extensive amount of change.
One of the biggest conversations that took place on a weekly basis last year was “MAs”, that is, missed assignments. It frequently seemed to be that the weeks during which that was a quieter conversation were the weeks where the offense did better.
The Steelers had not one but two new quarterbacks to adjust to last year, including, ultimately, a rookie. They had multiple new starters along the offensive line with mostly young and inexperienced starters around them, plus a new offensive line coach whose system differed from what the team was familiar with more substantially than normal.
All of that, plus other factors—WR George Pickens was also a rookie, and most of the starters got little work in with Kenny Pickett before he entered the starting lineup—helps explain a lot of why the offense did struggle last year.
Is Canada free of blame? Of course not. It’s not as though there were no schematic shortcomings in the Steelers’ preseason opener, and we haven’t even gotten to the game-planning stages yet. But I do not expect this offense structurally to be significantly different from last year in spite of my anticipation of better results.
In other words, it’s the same as it ever was. Only better.
