After weeks of waiting, it’s finally here… Matt Canada Firing Day!
For those who don’t follow football, Matt Canada was, until today, the offensive coordinator for the Pittsburgh Steelers. His passing offense — if you can even call it that — has been one of the least imaginative, most conservative in the league. There are almost zero deep passes, and even most of the short passes are to the sidelines; it’s almost like he’s allergic to the middle of the field. If that’s not easy enough to gameplan against, he also runs a bunch of slow-developing plays — bubble screens, jet sweeps — that get broken up behind the line of scrimmage for a loss. To be fair, the bread-and-butter running game has been fairly competent, but in today’s NFL, if ALL you do is run the football, you don’t go very far. We’re light-years removed from the “three yards and a cloud of dust” game of years past.
If you want to put some stats to it: the Steelers were 28th in both points and total yards during Canada’s tenure, and NEVER had a 400-yard offensive performance. In 2023 in particular, they’ve been outgained offensively in EVERY game they played. (Yet, they’re somehow still 6-4… which is a bit of a minor miracle, honestly.)
In short, Canada has widely been viewed amongst Steeler Nation as sucking at his job, pretty much since the day he was hired. But he had thus far managed to escape much in the way of accountability. In 2021, it was “Ben Roethlisberger no longer has the arm to throw deep, so they have to manage the playbook to what he’s capable of”. In 2022, it was “Kenny Pickett is a rookie, they’re easing him into things”. But now, in 2023, there’s no more built-in excuses and the offense looks as bad as ever… maybe even worse. And so today, the axe finally fell.
Now, I’m not going to pretend Matt Canada was the ONLY problem with this team. Kenny Pickett, the aforementioned quarterback, has been maddeningly inconsistent since being handed the starting job. Enough so that there are doubts creeping in over whether he can really be the franchise QB they hoped they were drafting. Maybe it’s not a fair comparison, but C.J. Stroud managed to hit the ground running this year, and it’s not clear the Texans’ personnel at the other 10 offensive positions are any better than the Steelers’. Sometimes QB’s have the “it” factor; sometimes they don’t.
Speaking of those other positions, they’re not immune from criticism either. The offensive line has had its ups and downs as well: they had a lot of turnover of personnel over the last few years and the charitable explanation is they’re still meshing; the less-charitable explanation is they signed the wrong guys. They’ve also struggled to find good wide receivers ever since Antonio Brown’s departure. Diontae Johnson puts up superficially good numbers and is certainly a success for a 3rd-rounder, but seems to disappear in big moments; George Pickens is a physical freak, but has a tendency to sulk and check out if his number’s not getting called. Calvin Austin has intriguing speed and elusiveness in the slot, but he also lost his entire rookie year to injury, so he’s still in learning mode. Allen Robinson… exists. So some of this is a personnel issue as much as a coaching one.
(The sole bright spot has been the emergence of running back Jaylen Warren. He’s a 5’8″ undrafted free agent, his physical tools don’t really leap out, but when he gets running north-south, he’s like a cannonball out there. And his stiff-arms are becoming the stuff of legend.)
But it starts with an offense gameplan that has been both predictable and unimaginative. Every. Single. Week. You can’t run an NFL offense when the opposing team knows your entire offense runs within 5 yards of the line of scrimmage. When a fairly team-first guy like Najee Harris admits to a locker room full of reporters that opposing teams pretty much know what’s coming… a new coordinator is probably the first and easiest thing you can do to try and fix it.
Among other things, they had to do it for the sake of the defense. The Steelers’ defense is actually pretty good this year, and T.J. Watt is a generational talent that they just signed to a huge contract. Since a 30-7 loss to the Texans back in Week 4, they haven’t allowed more than 19 points to an opponent. That should be enough to win football games in today’s NFL… if you can couple them to an offense that doesn’t three-and-out almost every possession. The Steel Curtain Steelers of the 70s would’ve struggled if their offense could never get them off the field for a breather.
As tenuous as their position in the standings is, they also had to do it for the standings. They’re still at 6-4, and there’s a few traditionally good teams having down years — Buffalo just fired THEIR offensive coordinator; Cincinnati just lost quarterback Joe Burrow for the year. The playoffs aren’t unrealistic if they can get the offense to play slightly better. Super Bowl? OK, probably not. But you gotta try, right? “Any given Sunday?”
Lastly, I’d argue they had to do it to force an honest reckoning regarding Pickett. Right now there’s this debate over how much of the offensive struggles were Canada’s offense, and how much were just that Pickett isn’t that good. In fact, I think a lot of the fanbase WANTS it to be Canada’s fault so they don’t have to reckon with the possibility we have to go back to the drawing board at quarterback. Admittedly, that’s probably a deeper dive than I wanted to do here, but it’s a question that needs to be resolved. And next year is going to be a deep draft for quarterbacks, so there’s a bit of a feeling that if Pickett ISN’T the guy, 2024 would be a good time to draft some competition at the position. If pushing Canada out the airlock is what creates the conditions for really scrutinizing Pickett’s strengths and weaknesses, that’s probably a net positive as well.
The only problem with all of this is that it’s pretty hard to make sweeping changes mid-season, especially when you’re mostly doing it with the same personnel that are already in place. Maybe they can go get a splashy outside hire in the offseason, but for now the Steelers already announced that running backs coach Eddie Faulkner will be the interim OC with QB coach Mike Sullivan as the play-caller. So maybe those two are sitting on a treasure-trove of plays they’re just dying to call (in my head-canon, I’ve already decided it’s a vintage Trapper Keeper labeled PLAYS MATT CANADA WOULDN’T LET ME RUN), but chances are it will look more like incremental tweaks to what already exists.
But all of that is for down the road. Today, the fans got what they wanted. Even if there’s a little undercurrent of “be careful what you wish for, you just might get it”.
Mental Zoomies 