Despite the defense falling apart at times during the 2023 NFL season, the main culprit for the Pittsburgh Steelers having a 7-6 record is the offense. Or rather, the reason that the Steelers have as good a record as 7-6 is the defense. There was false hope that former offensive coordinator Matt Canada had turned things around when he called the plays that helped second-year QB Kenny Pickett lead the first-team offense to five touchdowns on five drives in the preseason.
However, the offense never came close to being in the same planetary orbit as that success, and Canada was dismissed in late November. On Friday’s episode of The Herd, host Colin Cowherd skewered the Steelers in multiple ways, but he focused a good amount of his ire on the coaching staff for how it handles the offense.
“Steelers offensively think the jet sweep is revolutionary,” Cowherd said. “It’s used in high school…do you really think if you gave Kyle Shanahan, Andy Reid, Sean McVay, Sean Payton Pittsburgh’s offense, it would look like this? I mean, I know it’s Trubisky and Kenny Pickett, but would it look like this? This is embarrassing.”
As Cowherd noted, one of the lasting memories of the Canada era that will be burned into the brains of Steelers fans everywhere is the jet sweep. In 2022, the Steelers ran more jet sweeps than any other team in the league with 30 such plays. The Los Angeles Rams were second in the league with 20.
Now, it’s hard to completely revamp an offense mid-season. It’s hard to change much of anything when that change occurs outside of a team’s bye week. However, Cowherd isn’t blaming interim offensive coordinator Eddie Faulkner nor play-caller/quarterbacks coach Mike Sullivan for the ineptitude that is occurring on offense.
No, the blame goes much deeper than the guys who are handed the duties mid-season. This is an indictment of the organization’s philosophy on offense for the last few years under head coach Mike Tomlin. When Tomlin brought Canada in, the Steelers embarked on a journey of offensive futility that spanned the majority of three seasons. It brought QB Ben Roethlisberger’s career to a disappointing end and got Pickett’s career off to a very rocky start.
Just getting rid of Canada during the season won’t fix that. The last two games are a perfect example of that. Now, Canada certainly was a major problem with the Steelers’ offensive woes. He did nothing to help the Steelers develop an offense worthy of a Super Bowl contender. As Cowherd points out, we should expect that talented offensive minds would make the current offense much more productive.
Yet Canada was brought in despite his lack of sustained success, even at the college level. Tomlin made the decision to hire an offensive coordinator who did not have a track record of success at the college level despite having ample opportunities to do so. That’s a problem. We can all agree Canada was a big problem, but the fact that he was hired with known issues calling plays is a cause for concern
Fixing the offense requires a fundamental change with the Steelers, and the organization has a choice to make. Either Tomlin finds the right offensive coordinator hire in the offseason to fix and develop Pickett (or mold a high draft pick in the 2024 NFL draft), or team president Art Rooney II decides he can’t trust Tomlin to do so and finds a new head coach in conjunction with general manager Omar Khan.
Regardless of how the team chooses to proceed, the Steelers cannot continue to operate the same way they have, bringing in a mediocre-at-best play-caller while relying on the defense to pick up the slack almost every single game. The offense has too many players that are certainly capable of producing at the NFL level to be this bad. That means it’s on coaching, and according to Gerry Dulac of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, all the issues come back to head coach Mike Tomlin. This really means either Tomlin has a change of heart about how his team operates or the organization needs to have a change of heart about its loyalty.
You can watch the entirety of Cowherd’s thoughts on the Steelers-Patriots game below.
