When the Pittsburgh Steelers fired offensive coordinator Matt Canada last Tuesday morning, it was all but guaranteed that all eyes would be on QB Kenny Pickett and the rest of the offense Sunday afternoon when they took the field against the Cincinnati Bengals. Would the performance be more of the same? We might actually get an answer to the Steelers’ chicken and the egg question: Was Canada holding Pickett and company back, or was Pickett wrecking everything?
Well, early returns Sunday showed that perhaps the move to fire Canada should have come much earlier as a number of fans and media had called for. For the first time this season, Pittsburgh outgained an opponent. Not only that, but the offense did something they had failed to do once under Canada, gaining 400+ yards in a single game. 421 yards, to be precise.
However, despite the offensive yardage outburst, the Steelers only managed to score 16 points. While that was enough to get the win on Sunday and improve to 7-4 on the season, the points will need to come. That fact was not lost on Colin Cowherd. In the second hour of Monday’s episode of the Herd, Cowherd offered his sarcastic praise of the performance before pointing out the lack of scoring and taking a shot at Pittsburgh’s standards.
“They were able to break the 400-yard barrier,” Cowherd said. “That’s a big deal in Pittsburgh, they’re very excited there. They beat Jake Browning 16 to 10, so that sounds like great news. 16 points is below their season average. The Ravens dropped 34 last week on the Bengals, the Texans dropped 30. This team has a lot of talent, I don’t think Kenny Pickett is it. But I think when I watch a Kansas City, Dallas, Philadelphia, Jags, Baltimore, San Francisco, they’re operating with higher standards.”
Now Pickett had his best game of the season on Sunday. He posted a season-high 72.7% completion percentage after failing to hit the 70% threshold at all this season. He also threw for a season-high 278 yards. He failed to throw a touchdown for the third straight game, but he had his seventh-straight game without throwing an interception and fourth-straight game without a turnover. Yet he also threw for 8.4 yards per attempt which is tied for his second-best mark of the season.
However, the lack of scoring is definitely a problem. The 16 points the Steelers scored was their lowest total in a win and fifth-fewest points overall this season. You can certainly make the argument that there should have been a first-quarter touchdown to WR Diontae Johnson that both the refs and Pittsburgh’s coaching staff missed. Yet the reality is that the Steelers had a favorable matchup against a Cincinnati defense that has given up the seventh-most passing yards and the fifth-most rushing yards while allowing 25 touchdowns so far this season.
So while the Steelers showed a lot of improvement on offense in their first game with Mike Sullivan calling plays and Eddie Faulkner as the new offensive coordinator, there is still a ways to go. Churning out yardage on offense is good, but the most important job of the offense is scoring points. So until that starts to happen, guys like Cowherd will continue to dismiss Pittsburgh as being pretenders rather than true contenders.
