Now that the Pittsburgh Steelers’ 2022 season is over, the team finishing above .500 but failing to make the postseason, we turn our attention to the offseason and everything that means. One thing that it means is that some stock evaluations are going to start taking on broader contexts, reflecting on a player’s development, either positively or negatively, over the course of the season. Other evaluations will reflect only one immediate event or trend. The nature of the evaluation, whether short-term or long-term, will be noted in the reasoning section below.
Player: P Pressley Harvin III
Stock Value: Even
Reasoning: The second-year punter had a somewhat more consistent season in 2022 in comparison to his rookie year, improving in certain areas—particularly reducing the number of shanks.
Mercifully on the doorstep of free agency, we are now scraping the bottom of the barrel in terms of season-long stock watch evaluations. Likely, we are going to begin to see a flurry of movements in the coming days with players being re-signed, waived, perhaps restructured and traded. Perhaps some players even signed from outside the organization.
But we don’t have any of those yet that we haven’t already talked about, so we’re finishing things up by looking back at the past season and what that meant for individual players. Second to last on that last is punter Pressley Harvin III, who did, to his credit, have fewer people calling for his job.
A 2021 seventh-round pick, Harvin had his fair share of struggles amid a personally trying year. Both his father and his grandmother passed away during the season after long-fought battles with illnesses. He spent some time away from the team late in the year when his father passed away.
How much of his struggles could be attributed to his personal life is hard to say, but it wasn’t the full story, either. Some of the same issues that he displayed as a rookie remained evident in 2022, though typically in less dramatic fashion.
Probably the area he improved the most was in simply reducing the number of poorly-struck punts, or shanks, which would only travel a short distance in comparison to the intention. This also went hand in hand with the strides he took in improving his directional punting.
Still, most of his league-wide ranks were in the average territory, which admittedly was an improvement over the previous season. And he is to be credited for ably performing the role of holder, with three different kickers to worry about.
There is no reason to believe that he would be utterly free from any kind of competition, however. The Steelers didn’t really test him last year, but there should be another punter in training camp at the least, just to keep pushing him.
