How do you follow up an embarrassing performance on the field? Take that same level of execution to your press conference. That’s what Pittsburgh Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin did yesterday as he thoroughly underperformed in the area in which many think he shines the best: the art of oration.
Virtually nothing the 17th-year head coach had to say to reporters yesterday did anything to inspire or even to offer a shred of confidence in the capacity for this team to improve its lot. The Steelers’ model is simple: try not to make too many bad plays on offense, hope the defense can control the game, and rely on one or two big plays in the passing game. Anything on the ground is a bonus.
That’s far too much to ask, and it’s clear that the defense is not up to this, even with T.J. Watt, Alex Highsmith, and Minkah Fitzpatrick on the field. The Houston Texans showed on Sunday how they can neutralize the edge rushes well enough while containing the interior, and they did so with an offensive line full of backups that was supposed to be awful. Because their secondary isn’t good.
But even that could have been enough if the offense could have stayed out of its own way. That will not be possible with Matt Canada as the team’s offensive coordinator. Tomlin can spin it any way he wants, but when he says no changes are planned “at this juncture”, he better figure out how quickly he can get to the next juncture, because it can’t come soon enough.
Let me make something clear. In all things, the buck stops at Tomlin’s desk. Canada is here at Tomlin’s behest. He would be gone if Tomlin wanted him to be gone now, so the head coach wears that responsibility.
But within the offense and its day-to-day operations and how it runs during games, that’s on Canada first and foremost. Tomlin tried to wordplay his way out of explaining that Canada’s concepts might not be as bad as they are, but even that doesn’t work.
He talked about possibly not giving the players enough to work into, to practice, to understand and execute the concepts, but guess whose shoulders that falls upon, too? The offensive coordinator, the one who steers the ship of the unit. So if he can’t get his players to execute his scheme, then he’s failing either way, whether his scheme as an abstract concept is solid or not.
And please, the last thing I want to hear right now is what next after you fire Canada, or that the Steelers don’t fire coaches in-season. First of all, they can if they want to. Second, he’s in the last year of his contract. He’s a lame duck. They have no future years they have to pay for. They have stripped coaches of duties in-season before.
The thing is, it doesn’t matter what comes next. Not right now. That’s an offseason problem. But we cannot even begin to evaluate this offense when it’s being orchestrated by somebody who can’t run his own schemes or put schemes together that the players can be successful running.
I think that most who have followed the team close enough for long enough knew that this is how things were going to be for now. But I can easily see a point in time in which Tomlin will have no choice but to make a move if the struggles continue to be this glaringly obviously bad.
