For much of the 2023 season, if not all of it, the external momentum had been turning away from Pittsburgh Steelers RB Najee Harris and toward Jaylen Warren. Especially in the past three games, it had been Warren doing much of the heavy lifting and finding the holes and creases and making the difference-making plays.
Not that Harris had been a bystander. Although his numbers dipped last week, he was still performing during the same stretch, and finding the end zone as well. Yesterday, it was Warren who struggled to a degree and Harris who picked up the slack. Former Steelers DL and NFL analyst Chris Hoke is not surprised.
“I believe Jaylen Warren was getting the Najee Harris treatment”, he said on the KDKA Extra Point postgame show yesterday, following a game in which he rushed for 49 yards on 13 attempts while Harris picked up 99 on 15 and a touchdown.
“What I mean was when Jaylen was in the game, we’re going to stop the run, we’re putting guys at the line of scrimmage, we’re going to be dogs and we’re not going to let you run”, he went on. “Once you have that target on your back, people are going to come after you. People are going to game plan for you”.
Warren recorded three of his five highest carry totals in the previous three weeks leading up to yesterday’s game. He made use of that work, rushing for 318 yards and two touchdowns during that time. He averaged over nine yards per carry, though a 74-yard touchdown run was pretty helpful.
In contrast, he averaged under 3.8 yards per carry against the Bengals while Harris averaged 6.6 attempt. That included multiple 20-plus-yard runs, just his second career game with more than one explosive run.
Is it really the case, as Hoke suggests, that opposing teams’ perceptions have reversed? Are they now game-planning more to shut Warren down than they are Harris, and is that a contributing factor to what we saw yesterday?
Perhaps there is a grain of truth to it. After all, you start to become hard to ignore when you’re putting up 100-plus yards in back-to-back weeks and breaking off 74-yard touchdown runs. That’s going to be on every opponent’s film, so you have to come up with a way to combat it.
Now that they have, it’s on Warren and the Steelers to counter their adjustments to stop him. “Jaylen Warren’s been playing well”, Hoke said in wrapping up his thoughts on the subject. “Let’s see what he has with the extra emphasis on stopping him”.
