The best players should play the most snaps. That’s more or less a given, I would think. Provided that they can withstand the workload, you give yourself the best opportunity to win games by having your most talented contributors on the field as often as possible. For the Steelers, that man is T.J. Watt.
But right now, he’s on pace for his first 1,000-snap season. At 620 snaps through 10 games, he is on track to log 1,054 snaps in the regular season. That would blow away his previous career high of 935 snaps in 2019, even if he played the same percentage of defensive snaps in each year.
What makes his current pace especially curious, though, is the fact that they have arguably their deepest outside linebacker group around him since he was drafted in 2017. Alex Highsmith is one of the best second rushers in the game, and Markus Golden is a high-quality reserve. Rookie Nick Herbig has contributed positively when in the game. Watt explained why he’s on the field so much in spite of the support.
“Tight games, man. They’re really tight games”, he told reporters yesterday, via the team’s website. “It seems like every single week is a tight game. Every drive is so crucial, so important, that it’s very tough to take myself off the field when you don’t know when the game-changing play is gonna happen”.
That’s a simple enough explanation, I would imagine. 70 percent of their games have been decided by one possession. Given that they are 6-1 in those games, and that they only allowed 13 points in a three-point loss in the other, I would say their strategy of playing him a lot has been beneficial.
Yet he has mentioned on multiple occasions that he felt gassed at the end of games and expressed relief when somebody else made a game-winning play. That was particularly the case a couple of weeks ago against the Tennessee Titans, the offense marching down the field with a chance to win late before ILB Kwon Alexander made an interception in the red zone. The pass rush wasn’t getting home.
But those are the tight games he’s been talking about. They needed that last defensive drive. They needed another one for the win over Green Bay. And they didn’t get the one they needed this past Sunday against the Cleveland Browns, perhaps an indication that a change of course is in order. In all cases, the pass rush struggled toward the end of the final drive.
Even stranger still is the fact that his playing time percentage has only increased. He’s logged 97 percent of the snaps in each of the past two games, and 93 or more in the past three. With the exception of seeing only 79 percent of the snaps in the 20-10 loss to the Jacksonville Jaguars, he has played about the same or more in every game than he did the week before.
One might think it would go in the opposite direction as you gain more comfort and trust in your reserves. It’s not as though Golden and Herbig haven’t been acquitting themselves favorably when given the opportunities. Yet Herbig has seen single-digit snaps for most of the season. Golden has played 13 snaps in the past two games combined. Perhaps they’re wearing out their rushers but not spelling them more in the middle of the game so they can be fresher later.
