What is the breaking point for the Pittsburgh Steelers with offensive coordinator Matt Canada? That might be the most topical question surrounding the team right now—even more so than the availability and performance of QB Kenny Pickett.
Offensive coordinators are almost always among the least popular people in the cities in which they operate, rightly or wrongly, but Canada has been consistently called out at a national level in ways for which at least I personally have no immediate parallels.
With one more game before the bye week, some are holding out hope that head coach Mike Tomlin and the Steelers are at least open to making some kind of change if things continue to go south. Ray Fittipaldo of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette recently weighed in on that subject.
“I’m not hearing that verbalized by anyone within that building”, he said on 93.7 The Fan with Andrew Fillipponi and Chris Mueller, “but at a certain point, if things continue to go bad, I don’t know how much longer they can go with it, because there is a point where it does become a distraction, the constant talk about Matt and his offense”.
And it is constant. It’s a regular topic of conversation during every game, especially when the Steelers play in prime time. Players from around the league call out plays that they can hardly believe a professional at this level would run.
Asked last Tuesday if there were any consideration for an adjustment to the division of labor on the coaching staff, such as who calls the plays, head coach Mike Tomlin said, “Not at this juncture, no”. But it’s hard to know what to read into that. Is he leaving the door open, or is that just another way of saying “Why bother asking when you already know the answer?”
Fittipaldo wondered the same thing and wasn’t sure, either. What he does know, however, is that the subject of Canada and his role within the team is drawing an undue amount of attention. “Today at the facility, Matt and [defensive coordinator] Teryl Austin go to the podium at the same time, right out their outdoor practice fields”, he pointed out. “There were three reporters around Austin, and there were about 40 around Matt”.
That tells you a lot about the current state of things, especially given that Canada’s unit scored six points and Austin’s unit gave up 30 last Sunday in Houston. In Pittsburgh, a defense giving up 30 points is supposed to be huge. But not when you have Canada running the show on offense and they only manage two field goals, apparently.
And so it’s fair to ask the question: at what point does Canada’s presence, either generally or in his specific role, become too much of a distraction to carry on unchanged? If the offense continues to perform as it has in the first 240 minutes of play in 2023, we may very well find out.
