The Pittsburgh Steelers’ offense last season struggled. Even when they started to find their identify towards the end of the season, the team was not very efficient as evidenced by its 21-play drive against the Carolina Panthers. For the Steelers to improve this year they need more explosive plays, something that they struggled creating last season.
An explosive play is defined as a play that picks up 20 or more yards. Last year, the Steelers only had 52 explosive plays, good for 26th in the league. This needs to improve and Rich Hribar of Sharp Football said on the Rotoworld Football Show Podcast on YouTube that he thinks the Steelers should turn to Jaylen Warren to create explosive plays.
“This is a team starving for explosive plays,” Hribar said. “I wrote about this in the Sharp Football preview, the Pittsburgh Steelers scored two touchdowns outside the red zone last season, it was the fewest amount of touchdowns scored for a team over the past 30 years…But this is a team, when you look at the Pittsburgh Steelers structurally, where are the explosive players? You’ve got George Pickens and then it’s Jaylen Warren.”
Pickens was a consistent big play threat, but because of the lack of high-volume touches for Warren, some people may forget how effective he was in 2022. Warren averaged 4.9 yards per carry and almost always gained positive yards. His ability to pass block and catch the football earned him snaps early in the season, and once he got those snaps he took off as a player.
Warren’s 4.9 yards per carry was 1.1 yards better than Najee Harris’ but as the season progressed and Harris got healthy he took over. In addition, looking at context, Warren picked up some high yards per carry on draw plays when teams were expecting passes in blowouts, which also helped his yards per carry. In addition, Harris finished the last nine games of the season with a 4.02 yards per carry average.
Despite this Hribar thinks Pittsburgh might be better off leaning on Warren more often to create explosive plays.
“Warren is that dude, he’s got the juice,” Hribar said. “This is an offense that needs to generate bigger plays and they have a very limited supply of players who can create big plays and Jaylen Warren happens to be one of them.”
If Warren truly does create bigger plays then the Steelers should turn to him more because they need that. But, I am not sure Hribir analysis is 100 percent right here. When looking at yards before contact, Warren averaged 3.1 while Harris only averaged 2.7 yards. You can argue that maybe it is because Harris’ vision is worse, but I think it more has to do with his injury early in the year as we saw his output become very, very good towards the end of the season. Now, when looking at yards after contact Warren averaged 1.8 while Harris averaged 1.7 while dealing with an injury. Harris during his rookie year averaged 2.2 yards after contact as he was fully healthy.
Given these two important stats, I think Harris’ juice is just fine. The Steelers bolstered their offensive line this year and towards the end of last season the unit started to look good, especially in the run game. If Harris is healthy this year I think we may see some uptick in explosive plays with him.
Context is important. Warren is a good player and a great find as an undrafted free agent, but Warren never saw the volume Harris did last year so we don’t even know how he would handle it. He was thrown in much easier positions to pick up yardage than Harris, which somewhat inflated his numbers. Like I said, Warren is a very capable player, but Harris is a good player in his own right and I expect him to prove his doubters wrong this season.
Now, Warren should 100 percent see more snaps. He proved himself a very valuable player in both the run and passing game and giving him more snaps means a fresher Harris. Harris and Warren have the potential to be one of the NFL’s best one-two punches at running back, and the ball in either of their hand is a good thing. I just think people are writing Harris off way too early given what he had to deal with last season.
