Here’s something I bet you weren’t expecting to read today—or at any point this season. Pittsburgh Steelers RB Najee Harris leads the league in explosive runs after recording two on Sunday against the Cincinnati Bengals. His seven on the season match the total he’s had in his career up to this point and tie him with the Miami Dolphins’ Raheem Mostert for the most in the NFL through Week 12.
While neither of them flipped the field, going for 20 and 22 yards, respectively, Harris’ tough running produced yards after contact that helped set the tone for the day. Even now, his longest run of the season is still just 25 yards, and none of his explosive runs have found the end zone, but he is finding ways to produce, and that’s the point.
In fact, it was only the second time in his career in which he recorded multiple explosive runs in the same game. The first came against the Cleveland Browns last season, a game that included the longest run of his career, a 37-yard touchdown.
No, not all explosive runs are created equal, of course. The New York Jets’ Breece Hall, for example, has four on the season, but two have gone for 70-plus yards. Harris has the lowest yards per carry on explosive runs among running backs with at least three of them.
But he still has more of them than anybody expect for Mostert, which isn’t the narrative we have come to accept about the big, plodding back. After all, just last season he only had one explosive run, and just seven runs of 15-plus yards. This season he now has 11 and counting, with six games to go. That, too, is tied for the most in the league with Mostert and the San Francisco 49ers’ Christian McCaffrey.
Following his 15-carry, 99-yard, one-score effort, Harris now has 598 rushing yards on the season on 143 attempts with four rushing touchdowns, up to 4.2 yards per attempt. Over his past four games, he has 285 rushing yards with three touchdowns on 59 attempts, averaging over 4.8 yards per carry.
If he were to continue that pace over the final six weeks, he would add another 428 yards to his total for the season and would once again eclipse 1,000 rushing yards, making him the only player in team history to reach that mark in each of his first three seasons.
Of course, the question is whether he can start breaking off longer runs. He does have three 30-plus-yard rushes in his career, yet his next run of 40-plus yards would be his first. It’s not as though he’s so slow that that would be impossible.
He’s just never had the holes to help make that happen, or at least has found them the way Jaylen Warren has been more successful in doing—even if he only has one run of 40-plus yards in his regular-season career, a 74-yard touchdown a couple weeks ago.
