Steelers news: Art Rooney II talks Matt Canada, two-round mock draft, and more

Art Rooney II finally speaks out on the decision to keep Matt Canada, and The Draft Network conducts a two-round mock draft. Here’s the latest Steelers news.

As we gear up for championship weekend in the NFL, it’s been a quiet few days for Pittsburgh Steelers fans. Outside of Rashard Mendenhall making some unwanted noise regarding Ben Roethlisberger, there hasn’t been a lot happening around the organization.

On Thursday, however, we finally gained some insight as to why Pittsburgh is sticking with Matt Canada as offensive coordinator for the 2023 season. Here’s the latest Steelers news you need to know.

Steelers news

Yesterday afternoon, Steelers president Art Rooney II addressed the media and opened up about the team’s decision to keep Matt Canada around for the 2023 season. Here’s what he had to say, according to Will Graves on WTAE.com:

"“(Canada and Pickett) seem to work well together. You know, they built a good working relationship. To start over again with a new offensive coordinator (if we moved on), we could wind up back in the same situation again where the first half of the season you’re breaking in a new coordinator.”"

This statement was more or less what fans expected to hear. We figured that the organization would want to keep some continuity between Kenny Pickett and his offensive coordinator. In fact, it’s hard to stretch for many other reasons to keep Canada around outside of this. If things go south this year, we would expect a change at OC by 2024. The hope is that Pickett and Canada will collectively take a step forward in their second season together.

More Steelers news

In other Steelers news, Pittsburgh targets some important positions in the latest two-round mock draft from The Draft Network. Thanks to the Chase Claypool trade, Pittsburgh was able to pick up a second-round pick from Chicago — which essentially turned into the first pick of the second round.

With the 17th overall pick in this mock draft, Damien Parson of TDN has the Steelers going with Northwestern OT Peter Skoronski. This pick was followed up with CB Deonte Banks of Maryland (pick 33) and LB Trenton Simpson of Clemson (pick 50). This would be quite the haul for a team that desperately needs to revamp the talent at these three positions.

NFL news

Media outlets around the nation are taking notes about the four remaining teams and are realizing that they all have something in common: each of the four teams in the championship game have offensive-minded head coaches. Josh Dubow of Yahoo Sports is the most recent to point this out.

Last week, 7 of the 8 teams in the divisional round of the playoffs were led by offensive-minded head coaches, with Bills HC Sean McDermott being the only exception. Buffalo would go on to score 10 points in a loss to the Bengals.

This is something that I have written about personally several times, and it seems like the national media is catching up. This could just be a trend right now, but it certainly seems like having an offensive-minded head coach is the way to go in today’s NFL.