Playcalling won’t be a job requirement for whomever Mike McCarthy hires as offensive coordinator.
As the Pittsburgh Steelers’ new head coach, McCarthy will call plays for the offense, a responsibility he kept for himself during his final two seasons in Dallas and most of his 13 years in Green Bay. He is the Steelers’ first offensive-minded head coach since the 1960s.
“Definitely, I will call the plays on offense and, obviously, will run the offense,” said McCarthy, a former offensive coordinator in San Francisco and New Orleans.
McCarthy said he’d already started working on assembling his coaching staff before Tuesday’s introductory press conference. He didn’t reveal any candidates he was considering.
“These coaching staffs, it’s a bigger challenge each and every year,” he said. “I think there’s more moving parts to it. But it’s been very fluid the last 48 hours.”
The Steelers offense will get an overhaul, but the defense likely won’t. McCarthy said he intended to keep the current defensive structure, which for decades has featured a base 3-4 that’s heavily reliant on the talent of its outside linebackers.
But it’s not new for McCarthy. He adopted the scheme with the Packers and had former Steelers assistant Dom Capers to run his defense for nine seasons from 2009-17.
“As we build a staff, we definitely want to build off what’s in place here,” McCarthy said. “I don’t believe in the ‘throw out the baby with the bathwater’ method. I believe in building off what’s in place. There’s a lot here in place. I mean, the defense system has been here since 1992.
“It came here with coach (Bill) Cowher and Dom Capers. Always been a fan of it and always felt it was the toughest one to compete against as an offensive coach. (That’s) part of the reason why I went to it in Green Bay.”
McCarthy said he’d prefer to maintain the defensive language used nowadays for an easy transition. The offense, however, seems poised for a big overhaul.
His teams have traditionally used a version of the West Coast offense, a scheme dubbed the “Texas Coast” offense once he moved to Dallas. The Packers in 2011 and 2014 and the Cowboys in 2023 led the NFL in points with McCarthy calling plays.
Popularized by Bill Walsh as head coach in San Francisco in the 1980s, the original West Coast offense tried to stretch defenses laterally with a short, horizontal passing game.
“I’m a believer in the tradition of the West Coast offense,” he said. “The first thing that always came to mind was the offense needs to be built to make the quarterback successful. As simplistic as it is. That starts with running the football.”
Rather than fit players into a system, McCarthy said he’ll tailor his offense to the roster he has.
“If your system of football cannot take in every player that Omar (Khan) and Art (Rooney II) want to bring to the Pittsburgh Steelers, then you need to take a look at your system,” McCarthy said. “So, we need to make sure we can accommodate the variety of players that are available to us.”
