The Steelers are now back at the UPMC Rooney Sports Complex, facing down a long regular season that looks a lot more promising given how things have gone leading up to it. Finishing just above .500 last year, they anticipate being able to compete with any team in the league this season with second-year QB Kenny Pickett leading the way.
They’ve done a great deal to address what they identified as their shortcomings during the offseason, which included addressing the offensive and defensive lines as well as the secondary and the inside linebacker room, which is nearly entirely different from last year. The results have been positive so far.
Even well into the regular season and beyond, there are going to be plenty of questions that need answered. When will the core rookies get to play, or even start? Is the depth sufficient where they upgraded? Can they stand toe-to-toe with the Bengals and the other top teams in the league? We’ll try to frame the conversation in relevant ways as long as you stick with us throughout the season, as we have for many years.
Question: Will the Steelers have success running the ball against the Houston Texans?
If Pittsburgh is finally going to have some meaningful success on the ground this season, it might as well happen this week. The Houston Texans’ defense isn’t exactly stacked with headliners, and their run defense is nothing to write home about. They’ve already given up seven touchdowns on the ground in three games, so the Steelers would be happy to add to that total.
For their own efforts, Pittsburgh has just 201 rushing yards on the season, most of which came this past week against the Las Vegas Raiders—and that was not an impressive performance on the whole. At least, it was a very inconsistent one with far too many negative plays.
They are among the very worst in the league this year in running plays that gain zero or negative yards. Between Najee Harris and Jaylen Warren, they combined for six such runs in Las Vegas, in the game in which the run game supposedly came alive.
But there were bits and spurts in which they looked better, and there is reason to anticipate continued improvement. They shortened the play selection menu. We saw instances in which the blocking was more successful, particularly working on combination blocks—enough that the broadcast even put together a highlight montage of them.
Unfortunately, we have reached the point where we really can’t anticipate improvement, in my opinion, in general terms. There are too many issues in too many different areas for us to conjecture that clearly better days are on the horizon. If they can’t even check out of runs against bad box counts, I’m not going to get my hopes up until I actually see something tangible.
