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Matt Canada’s offense at Pitt has been defined a few elements.

There are the numbers: 426.5 yards per game, 214 rushing yards per game, 37.6 points per game and 36 points or more in eight of ten games this season.

There’s the impact: the offense has been the driving force behind the team’s success this season, either being responsible for winning games - as has been the case in all six wins - or keeping the team close enough to win in the losses.

And then there are the aesthetics. Pitt’s offense gets high marks there, too, as a mix of jet sweeps, power runs, shovel passes, timely downfield passing and old-fashioned triple-option looks have kept defenses off-balance enough to allow for those gaudy numbers.

A key component in the variety of plays Canada has devised for this offense has been the ever-increasing gallery of pre-snap movements. Every game, Canada and the offense come out with a new pre-snap look to confuse defenses and make it more difficult to pick up what Pitt is planning to do.

This was evident from the first play of the Penn State game, which was, in truth, the debut of Canada’s offense, since he showed very little in the opener against Villanova. On Pitt’s first offensive snap, the Panthers lined up with seven offensive linemen: the five starters plus Jaryd Jones-Smith at tight end and Connor Dintino at fullback.

And things got even more unique from there.

Subsequent games saw unbalanced lines, whether that mean left tackle Adam Bisnowaty lining up outside right tackle Brian O’Neill or vice-versa, or the extreme at Oklahoma State when Pitt brought O’Neill outside Bisnowaty and then lined up Jones-Smith and John Guy next to O’Neill, effectively putting an entire offensive line - five linemen - to the left of the center.

Pitt also used unbalanced looks by playing with the eligibility of various receivers and making it difficult for defenses to determine which players were eligible - an angle that probably helped O’Neill slip away from Georgia Tech for a lateral that he took to the end zone.

And then there are the shifts and motions. Sure, the receivers and tight ends and running backs move a lot pre-snap, but Pitt has taken to using motion with the offensive tackles, too. Once it was established that the Panthers would run plays with unbalanced lines, they threw an extra wrinkle in by lining up the tackles in different spots and then moving them around.

This reached a new level at Clemson on Saturday when Bisnowaty found himself at times in the slot and in the backfield, only to shift - usually with multiple other players - into his more conventional location.

But perhaps the most remarkable part of the motions and shifts and non-traditional lineups has been how clean Pitt has been. Through 10 games, Pitt’s offense has been flagged 10 times for false starts and just once for illegal procedure/formation/shift.

“A lot of good discipline by all the guys up there, a lot of practice, hard practice,” quarterback Nate Peterman said Monday when asked how the team has minimized the penalties amidst all the movement. “Really, the only times we’ve had those types of penalties is when the defense has done the shady stuff, calling ‘move’ calls and things like that. We’ve been practicing those a lot throughout the past weeks and I think that has helped us a lot to be more disciplined and hopefully we can continue to do that.”

To Peterman’s point, the bulk of Pitt’s false start penalties came on the Thursday night loss to Virginia Tech - a home game. The Panthers were flagged four times for false starts that night. The only other game in which they took more than one false start was the loss at Miami (they had two false starts that day). They were called for one false start each in the games against Penn State, Oklahoma State, North Carolina and Virginia; they didn’t have any false start penalties against Villanova, Marshall, Georgia Tech or Clemson - despite Memorial Stadium being one of the loudest and most difficult venues in the country.

“I think just the focus in practice every week really helps, and understanding of the offense,” Bisnowaty said this week. “Putting those two together really makes everything easy, and we have a good group of guys out there. We just listen to Nate and it all rolls smoothly.”