If complaints were currency, the coffers of the Church of the Pittsburgh Steelers would be overflowing this year just through the collection plate contributions in former offensive coordinator Matt Canada’s name.
Fired after two-and-a-half seasons on the job, Canada’s tenure with the team will certainly be remembered with a certain level of infamy, though its ultimate legacy is yet to be written. That will be tied to QB Kenny Pickett and what he does next.
We don’t know what that will look like, but we know what his first year-and-a-half has looked like. And we know what the offense as a whole has looked like during that time. In a word: amateur. Countless instances, it sometimes feels like an unprofessional performance. Even head coach Mike Tomlin acknowledged on Tuesday during his weekly press conference that the offense was making mistakes that should not exist this far into the season.
“There hadn’t been enough continuity in our work, certainly”, he said, via the team’s website. “It hadn’t developed at the rate that I would like it to. We’re still showing signs of September football in some instances, and that’s unacceptable, man. It’s late November”.
September is when the regular season begins. Especially in more recent years, many starters will have played very little or no live reps even in an exhibition setting by that point. The beginning of the regular season is generally understood as a sort of warm-up period in which teams will be expected to be a work in progress and prone to the mistakes that come in a collective without a great deal of collaborative experience.
But as Tomlin points out, it’s damn near Thanksgiving, and the Steelers line up with 10 players on the shadow of their own goal line in the middle of November. Not long ago, they even managed to draw an illegal formation penalty in the victory formation. These sorts of things are not even acceptable in August, let alone November.
The only real tangible difference in the offense between now and the start of the season is the fact that the run game has gradually worked its way into better form. The offensive line has improved, to a degree, particularly in run-blocking, but the pass protection is still lacking. And RB Jaylen Warren had more rushing yards after contact on Sunday than any other player had rushing yards in total.
While the orchestrator of the amateur-hour offense may have been fired, nothing gets fixed by magic. It’s not as though Canada was solely responsible for making sure which personnel is on the field for any given play, anyway.
It’s now in the hands of Eddie Faulkner as interim offensive coordinator and Mike Sullivan as play caller to try to bring a level of professionalism to a unit that is long overdue on the eve of The Most Wonderful Time of the Year.
