The Pittsburgh Steelers ended the season at 9-8 and missed the playoffs this year.
Many Steelers fans were calling for Matt Canada’s job throughout the season as the offense continuously performed pretty poorly. Even with a great final week in which the Steelers scored 28 points, Pittsburgh finished the season 26th in the league in points per game. With Mike Tomlin being an established defensive head coach and Kenny Pickett being a rookie QB who took over during the season, most blame has fallen onto Matt Canada’s shoulders.
I agree that Canada did a relatively poor job if we were to look strictly at the offensive production this season. However, the blame shouldn’t be placed solely on Canada when there were a handful of obvious mistakes every week. Things like bad throws, missed blocking assignments, penalties(particularly pre-snap), and dropped passes also played a factor.
All signs point to Canada returning as Offensive Coordinator in 2023
Even with all of the opinions swirling around Matt Canada by media and fans alike, at the end of the day, our opinions don’t mean anything in terms of what goes on in the organization. Mike Tomlin had his end-of-the-year press conference on Monday after the Steelers’ final game of the season. Of course, he was asked about Matt Canada’s performance throughout the season and Tomlin’s response was as follows, “You know I thought he got better just like our team got better”.
He then went on to say he is not going to speculate on the status of Canada or anyone at the current time as he had been preparing for the possibility of the playoffs and was not ready to make those decisions as of yet. If we were to go off of Kenny Pickett’s post-game press conference after the season you’d think that more of the midseason issues were on Pickett than on Canada. KP8 talked about it taking some time for him to feel like he was taking ownership of the offense and talked about knowing all the different alerts and having everything on each play at his disposal.
Kenny Pickett seemed very in favor of his offensive coordinator and quarterback. Here’s what he said in his post-game press conference following the season finale vs Browns:
"I really appreciate Coach Canada and Coach Sully for the season that we had and you know, putting a lot of time in. I don’t think anyone realized how much time the coaches put in, but you know they’re pretty much living at the facility and doing everything they can to get us in the position to win.”"
Pickett also cited constant communication with Canada and that Canada took more and more feedback from Pickett the more he played.
With a head coach that seemed to be tolerant of failure as long as it appears to be on the path towards success, and a, what is believed to be a young franchise quarterback seemingly supporting him, Matt Canada’s job is likely safe for at least the 2023 season.