The Pittsburgh Steelers haven’t had a clear offensive identity for a few years. While they’ve seemed to want to be a team that can push people around and win in the run game, they haven’t been effective at doing so in the past, and especially not this season. With Aaron Rodgers in the fold, the Steelers could be more inclined to be a team that wins through the air, but the passing game wasn’t particularly strong in Week 2. Right now, Mike Tomlin said the Steelers don’t have a clear offensive identity, attributing it to the small sample size of having played just two games.
“It’s the early stages of the year. We’re just trying to win football games. We’re trying to distribute the ball to capable people in their areas of strength. I think that will be revealed as we all get a larger body of work. Not only for us, but for those that we compete against. I think a two-game body of work is a small, small sample size,” Tomlin said about the Steelers’ offensive identity during his Tuesday press conference [via the team’s YouTube channel](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOSywByujSw).
The Steelers should know what they want to be offensively. It’s a new team with new personnel, especially offensively with Rodgers, DK Metcalf and the likes of Jonnu Smith and Kenneth Gainwell all new to the team. But they should still at least have an idea of what their identity is or what they want it to be.
There’s been enough time for the offense to work together to be cohesive for the Steelers to try and build an identity, and it’s a little bit concerning that they don’t really have one yet. On the flip side, they haven’t been able to live up to what they want their identity to be in the past, and giving the offense time to figure things out could make them more effective down the line.
But you’d like for a team to have a plan of how they want to attack and what they want to be. In Week 1, we saw a lot of play-action success, but that was limited in Week 2. Some of the issues were execution-based, with drops and missed assignments blocking. That can make it hard to form a real identity. They should know the type of offense they want to be, though, and work toward being an offense that has a real identity.
Week 3 will be a big litmus test for the offense against the New England Patriots. After one solid performance and one poor performance, the Steelers need to show that they can bounce back, and maybe we’ll get a taste of the team they want to be in Gillette Stadium.