For two and a half years, The Pittsburgh Steelers offense has been orchestrated through the lens of Matt Canada. While he is no longer on the job as offensive coordinator, they cannot gut his system wholesale in-season, so his presence will continue to be felt. But we will begin to see today to what degree.
Following his firing last week, today will mark the first game under Eddie Faulkner as interim offensive coordinator—and under Mike Sullivan as the play-caller. It’s uncommon for teams to split up those two roles, especially if the head coach isn’t occupying one of them, but head coach Mike Tomlin explained his reasoning to go with Sullivan on the Mike Tomlin Show yesterday.
“Mike Sullivan will be the primary play-caller, and there are two really critical reasons why he’s doing that”, he said. “He has experience in that in two NFL cities, New York and Tampa. And he’s the guy that deals directly with Kenny, and so there’s great fluidity there from a play-calling perspective in an effort to best put Kenny in position, particularly as it pertains to the passing game”.
Sullivan has been the Steelers’ quarterbacks coach since 2021 when Canada was promoted from that role to the offensive coordinator post. He has been QB Kenny Pickett’s position coach since the moment he was drafted and has worked with him intimately on a daily basis throughout that time.
After eight years in the New York Giants organization, first as wide receivers coach and later as quarterbacks coach, Sullivan was given the opportunity to be offensive coordinator with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. He held that post for two seasons in 2012-13 under Greg Schiano. They improved from 27th in points in 2011 to 13th in QB Josh Freeman’s fourth season, but bottomed out to 30th a year later along with Freeman’s career, who was benched early in the season in favor of a rookie Mike Glennon.
The Buccaneers were gutted the following offseason and Sullivan found himself back in New York, where within two seasons he was been in a coordinatorship role under first-year head coach Ben McAdoo, hired to replace Tom Coughlin after himself being the team’s offensive coordinator. They went from being sixth in points to 26th, however, yet still went 11-5 thanks to a very good defense with a late-career Eli Manning begging to be benched. He lasted two seasons, and McAdoo didn’t have much longer.
After spending one season as quarterbacks coach for the Denver Broncos in 2018, Sullivan was out of the league for a few years prior to his hiring in 2021 by the Steelers. And there is little doubt that he is the most qualified member of the coaching staff to serve in that play-calling capacity today.
We will get a sense of how justified that is by the product on the field. Although it is Faulkner who has assembled the game plan throughout the week, Sullivan will have been involved in that process, as inevitably any decent quarterbacks coach would.
