While uncharted territory for the Pittsburgh Steelers, moving on from an in-season coordinator firing is standard operating procedure around the NFL. it probably happens just about every single year, frequently on multiple occasions. Just this year, the Steelers’ firing of offensive coordinator Matt Canada was preceded by the Buffalo Bills parting ways with their own offensive coordinator in Ken Dorsey.
Either way, the Steelers are not the rest of the league, so it will be a feeling-out process this week as they test their new setup. Running backs coach Eddie Faulkner will be running things during the week, but he’ll know his place on game days with quarterbacks coach Mike Sullivan tasked with actually calling the plays.
“He and I are going to work real hard to be in lockstep with each other”, Faulkner said of his working relationship moving forward with Sullivan, via transcript provided by the team’s media relations department. “On game day, any play caller wants to be narrowly focused on what he needs to do and I’m not going to interfere with that”.
In case anybody was wondering, he did confirm that both of them will remain on the sideline, as they have been. Canada spent most of his tenure as offensive coordinator working in the booth upstairs, even though he had been down on the sideline as quarterbacks coach himself in 2020.
“We’re going to have enough conversations so when we go into that game atmosphere, we’re all on the same page when the chips start to fall out”, Faulkner insisted, yet reiterated the clear hierarchy for calling plays.
“I’ll be right there close to Sully”, he said, but “he’s going to want to be locked into the game and seeing what he’s seeing and dial the plays up. I don’t want to interfere with that. I wouldn’t want that to be the case for me. So we’ll be next to each other and have conversations in between series to map a plan forward and we’ll roll”.
No doubt head coach Mike Tomlin reserves the right to change course based on results. But Sullivan is the only one in the room who has experience calling plays at the NFL level, so that is why he is in charge of that. Faulkner is the strongest interpersonal communicator on the coaching staff, so he is handling the day-to-day things and building the offense during the week.
But it will all be a collaborative process at the end of the day, as it has been. Coaches will talk. Ideas will be exchanged. Where ideas come from won’t particularly matter as long as they work. Still, leave it to the Steelers to do something different when they fire a coordinator in-season for the first time in team history.
