The news came in quick and strong Tuesday morning. The Pittsburgh Steelers ended a three-year experience, firing offensive coordinator Matt Canada ahead of the Week 12 matchup against the Cincinnati Bengals on the road.
For many, it was a little too late into the experience. For others, it was a surprise that the move occurred at all as the Steelers typically don’t make coaching changes in season.
Yet there it was, the decision to fire Canada Tuesday, changing things up in Pittsburgh. Though the move was necessary after an embarrassing 13-10 loss to the Cleveland Browns on the road in Week 11, capping a disappointing tenure offensively, the question now becomes: Will anything change moving forward this season for the Steelers?
NFL Network analyst Brian Baldinger questions if anything will truly change as the players still have to go out and execute.
“So the offense coordinator is the fall guy, and I say fall guy because Matt Canada calls the plays…But there’s just, the quarterback is not playing well, has not played well all year. Is that the offense coordinator’s fault?” Baldinger stated regarding the decision to fire Canada, according to audio via The Best Football Show podcast from Audacy. “Okay, if you’re saying, ‘Let’s get George Pickens involved in more ways, let’s get him more targets,’ okay, the offensive coordinators can design that kind of stuff. Gotta go execute it.
“If Diontae Johnson is running a go route and Kenny Pickett is running a stop and the ball ends up in the dirt and on third down and you’re walking off the field, is that the offense coordinator’s fault?”
Baldinger certainly raises some good points, though some of that falls on Canada himself.
Pickett isn’t playing well — at all. He’s regressed hard in his second season in the system. Is that Canada’s fault or Pickett’s? It’s likely both, but the blame can’t be placed on one person and one person only.
As far as scheming up ways to get Pickens the football more, that’s on Canada. He’s in charge of calling the plays and scheming things up. If a teams want to get the ball to a playmaker more than they have been, that’s relatively easy to achieve based on play calls. But that didn’t happen for the Steelers. They didn’t execute that from a game plan or on-field execution standpoint.
The communication issues between Johnson and Pickett aren’t exactly on Canada, though, as Baldinger points out. If the two aren’t on the same page on the field, that’s not a failure on Canada’s part, though maybe things needed to be even simpler offensively.
But sometimes, a change needs made just for change’s sake. Maybe that’s the point Pittsburgh got to with Canada and the offense.
“I guess something, you know, sometimes just like in Buffalo, sometimes just have to make the change to make the change. Sometimes it’s not even, ‘Oh well, we’re tired of listening to the noise.’ Sometimes you just have to look at your team, like Mike Tomlin has to look at it and go, ‘We’re good enough to make a playoff run,'” Baldinger said regarding the Steelers’ decision. “‘We’re good enough to get to the playoffs, but not when we’re scoring 10 points and not when we can’t convert third downs and not when we can’t get the ball to what we think is our star wide receiver in George Pickens.’ All those things.
“So Matt Canada’s the fall guy, so we’ll see things change.”
That remains the big question. Will things change? We’ll see if they do, starting this weekend against the Bengals on the road.
