In the first two weeks of the regular season, the Pittsburgh Steelers have given up 188 and then 198 rushing yards. Even if you account for outlier runs, they are still averaging around 120 yards allowed on the ground per game, and those long 60-plus-yard runs do very much count.
And in both cases, by the way, CB Levi Wallace played a front-and-center role in allowing those long runs to happen. He missed his mark on a tackle attempt of Christian McCaffrey in the first game, and then lost edge contain on Monday night. But I digress.
Recently promoted from the practice squad, NT Breiden Fehoko wants to be a part of the solution, but he knows the Las Vegas Raiders and RB Josh Jacobs provide a different challenge from the 49ers and the Browns. It calls for his style of football.
“Everyone talks about eating up space, but this is the week you have to eat up space inside, because Josh Jacobs wants to run north and south”, he told reporters on Wednesday, via the team’s website. “He doesn’t really want to run east and west. That’s not his strength. His strength is in between the tackles, downhill. The more we can get bodies inside from that B gap to the other B gap of the offensive tackles, I think we’ll have a good job this week”.
The Steelers have only faced Jacobs once before, last year, and they handled him well. He was limited to just 44 rushing yards on 15 attempts, averaging under three yards per attempt with a 40-percent success rate. The Raiders had 58 rushing yards as a team, though they were an average running team generally in 2022.
Perhaps it’s a style of running the defense is just more comfortable defending, because the Steelers couldn’t handle what the 49ers and Browns showed them, particularly when it came to stretching the field horizontally. That tended to be when the biggest issues arose.
“The past two weeks we’ve faced teams that like to run east to west, sideline to sideline, wide zone, mid zone, tight zone, you name it” Fehoko said, noting his familiarity having played in the AFC West tells him that’s not how the Raiders like to run.
“I’ve got a lot of respect for that fullback, Jakob Johnson, they have”, he added. “I think he’s the key to their running game. They like to get a body on a body, a hat on a hat, and I think it’s really important, the interior-wise, this week that we’re physical at the point of attack”.
Johnson, a former defensive lineman turned tight end in college, converted to fullback in the NFL, and the 6-foot-3, 255-pounder has seen a lot of playing time. He already has 35 offensive snaps on the season and has topped 300 snaps in each of the previous three years. And I can tell you he’s not getting a lot of offensive touches.
