Prior to the hiring of Arthur Smith, Pittsburgh Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin had sought continuity in his coaching staff. The only coordinator promotion who wasn’t an internal hire was Todd Haley, previously at offensive coordinator. And that was another move made at a time when pressure dictated a radical departure.
And the players are seeing the tangible differences so far in playing under Arthur Smith, compared to Matt Canada. The Steelers spent the past three years with Canada as offensive coordinator with poor to middling results. Even the practices have a different feel to it, and…things actually seem to make sense.
“I’ll just say the intensity”, RB Jaylen Warren said yesterday, via the team’s website, when asked what differences he sees in the offense under Smith. “Everybody’s bought into one thing, and there’s no space wondering how we’re trying to run our offense. Everybody’s on the same page. I think you could tell a huge difference with that”.
That comment, there’s no space wondering how we’re trying to run our offense, strikes me as particularly significant. One of the biggest internal complaints, so we’ve heard, about Canada’s offense is that he didn’t communicate a purpose. Players didn’t understand why they were doing what they were doing. Arthur Smith makes it very clear exactly why he is asking them to do everything.
With that said, it’s May, and they are far from the finish line. Unlike recent years, however, they know where they’re heading, even if they don’t quite know how they’ll end up there. “I’d say we’re still looking for [our] identity”, Warren acknowledged. “We don’t know exactly what’s there yet, but we’re all bought into the same narrow road”.
Numerous players complained after losses about the offense lacking an identity over the past two years. It even reached a point where Tomlin had to step in last October and say that declaring your identity is “stupid”. I think it was around that time that Tomlin also admitted that sometimes he’s just blowing smoke. That one was quite a puff in our eyes. Especially given the stark contrast players see in how Arthur Smith run things compared to Canada.
“It’s definitely a different expectation”, T Broderick Jones said about Smith’s offense. “He just comes with the juice. He has the juice every day like that. He wants to have the best offense in the NFL, and he lets us know that every day. We just go out there and try and put our best foot forward every day to try to take those baby steps to being the best”.
If Canada had any juice, it only drained out like cold maple syrup. That’s why the Steelers moved in a different direction. They brought in Arthur Smith in part because they know he comes with no ambiguity. He knows how to run a tight ship and keep (almost) everyone happy at the same time. Of course, time will tell whether it actually works out in Pittsburgh. But it’s off to a better start than the Canada years.
