The Pittsburgh Steelers’ decision to retain Matt Canada as offensive coordinator this offseason was one of the more controversial moves in the league. It earned quite a bit of coverage on the national sports media circuit, far beyond what the comings and goings of an average coordinator might generate, but there was reason for it.
After all, the Steelers fired Canada last week, their first in-season firing of a coordinator essentially in their history. While players have said they were surprised by the decision and some expressed sadness on his behalf, everybody, says WR Diontae Johnson, has bought into the change and the opportunity for rejuvenation it brings.
“Yeah, we felt that all week”, he told reporters yesterday, via the team’s website, when asked about the buy-in among the players rising. “Just at practice, the energy walking around and on the field as well. You see it carry over into the game. Obviously, we didn’t score three touchdowns. That was our main goal, scoring three touchdowns, but just keep working. It’s gonna come”.
No, the Steelers didn’t quite reach their goal, finishing this past Sunday’s game with 16 points, but that still proved to be enough to best the Cincinnati Bengals. There was also the controversial ruling of an incomplete pass in the second quarter on what otherwise appeared to be a touchdown by Johnson. RB Jaylen Warren fumbled on the next play, and the Steelers exited that red-zone possession with no points at all.
But while the points were harder to come by than they would have liked, it felt like there was one key difference from the rest of the season in this last outing: they actually had a margin for error to work with for a change.
For most of the season up to this past week, it seemed as though any minor setback would torpedo the potential for any drive. And any failure to score down in the red zone felt like a fatal setback from which the Steelers would not recover, because they weren’t going to get back down there.
Yet on Sunday, they put up over 400 points of offense, something that literally never happened even once during Canada’s two-plus seasons as offensive coordinator. They reached the red zone four times in spite of the fact that they rarely started with good field position. They never went three-and-out and picked up 30-plus yards on all but one competitive drive.
More welcome news: they won possession downs, going 8-for-16 on third downs in competitive situations (excluding the final kneel down). They picked up 22 first downs in all, including 15 through the air. They hit six explosive plays, four through the air and two on the ground.
I could go on. They averaged 6.2 yards per play overall. They only had one negative play all day, and that was near the very end of the game (a one-yard loss that cost RB Najee Harris his first 100-yard game of the year). All that was missing was points, and that can be attributed to their 1-for-4 in the red zone, and the one turnover—which came inside the 20 and took at least three points off the board. Still, the point is, this last game left them quite a bit to build from.
