Now that the Pittsburgh Steelers’ 2023 season is getting underway after the team finished above .500 but failing to make the postseason last year, we turn our attention to the next chapter of Steelers football and everything that entails. One thing that it means is that some stock evaluations are going to start taking on more specific contexts as we get into the season, reflecting more immediate plusses and minus rather than trends over long periods. The nature of the evaluation, whether short-term or long-term, will be noted in the reasoning section below.
Player: P Pressley Harvin III
Stock Value: Down
Reasoning: The third-year punter seems to be trending in the direction of missing his second straight game with a hamstring injury. Off to the best start of his career and coming off one of his best games against the Las Vegas Raiders, he may be looking at three weeks off, having already missed one game, and the bye week coming up, potentially risking his positive momentum.
Do punters have momentum? I guess you would have to ask a punter. I would guess that they do; after all, they are human. And let’s face it, for the past few weeks, P Pressley Harvin III looked like he was enjoying himself out there. It was cool to see him getting hyped up after pinning one inside the 10 in a clutch situation.
But that evidently came at a price, because he suffered a hamstring injury along the way. It has already caused him to miss this past week’s game against the Houston Texans. Through the first two days of practice this week in preparation for the Baltimore Ravens, he has not been a participant.
Unless he practices today, I would imagine that he has no chance of playing. The Steelers added Brad Wing to their practice squad last week to fill in for him. He didn’t do too horribly, though by no means is this a situation in which a job could be on the line. Wing hadn’t been in the NFL since 2017.
Still, it’s fair to question how this setback will affect Harvin’s performance when he returns. First of all, he will have been dealing with a hamstring injury. His right hamstring, specifically, which is the leg that he punts with. I’m assuming that’s worse than the other leg for a punter.
Although his net average of 40.3 yards over the first three games was slightly down from the year before, that can be partially attributed to the fact that he has been punting from closer to midfield than he was a year ago. Importantly, he has been pinning punts inside the 20-yard line at a higher rate, 42.1 percent, compared to just 29 percent in 2022.
And like with any other position, it’s about timing. He had a great punt at the end of the Raiders game that helped set the defense up to close the game out when the offense could not run out the clock on its own. That’s called complementary football.
