When healthy, the pass-rushing duo of T.J. Watt and Alex Highsmith is one of the very best in the NFL.
Together, the two are absolute game-wreckers and play well off of each other overall.
Combined, the two have recorded 65.5 sacks in three seasons from 2020, when Highsmith was drafted, until now. Watt had a historic year in 2021, recording 22.5 sacks to tie the single-season sacks record with Michael Strahan, while Highsmith put up 6.0 sacks opposite him and really developed into a key run defender that season.
Then, last season, Highsmith recorded a career-high 14.5 sacks which came at a great time as Watt missed seven games due to injury.
Health is the key with the duo. When together on the field, they make Pittsburgh’s defense an elite one.
Knowing that, it’s rather strange to see the duo projected to play nearly 1,000 snaps each in 2023 yet finish with just 10 sacks each, according to ESPN’s Mike Clay and his 2023 season projections.
In Clay’s projections, Watt and Highsmith are projected to finish with just 10.6 sacks each with Highsmith playing 917 snaps and Watt playing 906 snaps.
That snaps projection for Watt would be the second-highest total of his career in a single season. His highest total came in 2019 when Watt recorded 14.5 sacks. Of course, in his career season in 2021, Watt played just 758 snaps, missing some time due to injuries.
So, seeing he would play the second-highest number of snaps in his career and have the fewest sacks in a single season — when healthy — since his rookie season in 2017 is rather puzzling. The more snaps Watt plays, based on projections, the more sacks he should have. Yet, Clay is rather low in his projections not only for Watt and Highsmith, but for the Steelers overall. In Clay’s projections, the Steelers record just 43 sacks on the year.
Along with Watt, Highsmith sits at just 10.6 sacks in Clay’s projections.
Highsmith is projected to play 917 snaps, which would be the second-highest of his career, just behind last season’s 941 snaps in which he recorded 14.5 sacks.
Assuming the two are healthy enough to play 900+ snaps together in 2023, those sack numbers should be much, much higher.
Playing without Watt across from him, Highsmith recorded just 4.0 sacks in the seven games Watt missed. That’s not a bad number overall and would have put him right around 10.0 sacks on the season if Watt had missed the entire year. However, the lack of production and splash plays was a bit noticeable from Highsmith without Watt on the other side.
When Watt was in the lineup last season though, Highsmith was a game-wrecker, recording 10.5 of his 14.5 sacks on the season and four of his NFL-leading five forced fumbles on the year. Having a truly dominant player like Watt on the field certainly helped Highsmith in terms of attention paid to the other side of the defense.
The projections simply don’t make sense. It’s certainly understandable that there’s a model that Clay plugs numbers into and gets a projection spit back out at him that he plugs into his sheet, but some common sense needs applied, especially when it comes to Highsmith and Watt being projected to play some of the most snaps of their careers, yet having rather low sack projections.
