Offense ready to shut up and put more points on the board

after his one-year suspension for drug use.

After that, they need to follow the Nike slogan: Just do it.

“We know we have the potential pieces in there,” Pro Bowl guard David DeCastro said, “and now we have to stop talking about it and make it happen.”

Their stated goal is 30 points each game. They reached it five times in 16 regular-season games in 2016, including a 35-30 loss to Dallas. They made it once in three games in the postseason. They averaged 24.9 points per game last season when only one NFL team topped 30, the NFC champion Atlanta Falcons, at 33.8.

Their 399 points were the fewest in their past three seasons, including 2015 when Landry Jones and Michael Vick combined for five starts at quarterback for an injured Roethlisberger and center Maurkice Pouncey missed the entire season with a leg injury.

“We just have to make it happen,” guard Ramon Foster said. “We say all of this stuff about what we can and should do. Us making it happen is going to be the biggest [part] in it.

“We can say that we’re going to go 19-0 or whatever … we want to say; until that happens, until everybody’s on the same page and our offense is clicking, none of that matters. That’s what camp is for.”

There is an old, succinct saying for what that all means: Put up or shut up.

The Steelers ranked 10th in scoring in the NFL last season, slightly better at No. 7 in total yards. They believed they would improve over that this season with the return of Bryant from his one-year suspension, the drafting of Smith-Schuster and the health of Sammie Coates, all at wide receiver to go with Brown.

“We’ve got a lot of weapons, we really do,” Roethlisberger said. “To have a ‘problem’ if you will at wide receiver of depth — to have all those guys we have there …

“There are some new guys, some guys we have to get into the fold, in the mix. Martavis, that deal, Justin Hunter, JuJu. We have some questions now, but I think the potential, on paper, we have the makings of one of the best.”

The questions are when Bryant will return, when Bell will end his holdout, when Coates recovers from his latest setback — knee scope surgery — and when Smith-Schuster returns from an ankle injury on his very first day of practice in Latrobe. And just how long Conner remains out.

All the absences might be temporary, but they have delayed what should be a Ferrari of an offense to start well. Even when it does, they will have to do much better than be the No. 10 scoring machine in the NFL with all that talent.