The Pittsburgh Steelers are gearing up to pay outside linebacker Alex Highsmith coming off a breakout season. Not only did he finish 2022 with 14.5 sacks, he recorded a league-high five forced fumbles, which did not happen by accident.
“It’s something that I’ve been working on for a long time. It’s not done overnight”, the fourth-year veteran told Ron Cook and Joe Starkey on 93.7 The Fan yesterday. “Every pass rush that I do in individual and team when I’m near the quarterback, just working on reaching my right arm and doing the motion like I’m swiping down the ball”.
While not all of his forced fumbles come rounding the bend to get to the quarterback, many of them do, so it’s important to practice that particular scenario over and over again. And he has a good example to follow in T.J. Watt, who has had five or more forced fumbles—most on sacks—in three of the past five years.
“You can’t touch the quarterback in practice, but just getting that muscle movement, that muscle memory of me coming down on the ball is so important”, Highsmith said, “because most QBs I play, they can’t see me on the side that I come off. Just continuing to rep that in practice every single rep…just finishing with a reach of my right arm like I’m reaching for the ball. It’s just so important to continually practice that because it becomes muscle memory”.
Muscle memory, then, is the key. Or one of them, anyway. You have to be in position to get a strip in the first place, whether that’s on the pass rush coming after the quarterback or working against any other type of ball carrier, be it a running back, a wide receiver, a tight end.
All teams, including the Steelers, work on dislodging the football. Pittsburgh could use some better luck, however. They forced nine fumbles last year as a team, but only recovered three of them, which was the fewest in the NFL. They can’t count on leading the league in interceptions every year.
But if they can get both Highsmith and Watt going at a high level consistently throughout the year, they will double their odds of forcing fumbles, and if they can recover even half of them, it would represent a marked improvement.
Newcomer Markus Golden is not unfamiliar with the operation, either. He most recently recorded four forced fumbles during the 2021 season, so the Steelers have players coming off the edge who know how to get the ball out.
It’s all about muscle memory. The more you do it, the more you can do it. James Harrison learned his way of doing things and he forced 34 fumbles over the course of his career, including an astonishing 25 over a four-year period.
