The Steelers have had a host of visible problems this season. A lot of the focus and the blame has been put on the offense, and rightfully so. It’s tough to watch a historically bad offense like this Patriots suddenly look like the 07’ Patriots compared to Mitch Trubisky and Company.
But while it’s gotten the majority of the attention, the offense is far from the only issue with this team. Another one has been components of their special teams. While Miles Killebrew had a huge punt block on Thursday and K Chris Boswell has been as good as ever, the unit as a whole has been far from perfect.
Today, let’s take a look at Pressley Harvin. At first glance, his standard statistics tell a bit of a mixed story. On one hand, he’s bottom three in the league in punting average, and bottom ten in punting net average. However, he’s sixth in the league in punts down inside the 20 and has raised his inside-the-20 punt percentage from just 29% last season to over 40% this season.
But the truth about punting stats is that without context, they aren’t very helpful. It’s a lot more impressive to punt from your 20-yard line to the opponent’s 21-yard line than it is to put from the 50 to the opponent’s 19, but some stats might not see it that way. Even net yardage can be deceiving due to the initial field position the team is punting from.
One helpful stat we can use to level out the playing field a bit is EPA, or expected points added. ThePuntRunts on Twitter has provided the above analysis on the league’s punters. We can see that Harvin ranks fifth-to-last in the league, only ahead of Brad Robbins of the Cincinnati Bengals, Ty Zentner of the Tennessee Titans (formerly of the Houston Texans), Trenton Gill of the Chicago Bears, and Lou Hedley of the New Orleans Saints.
The useful thing about EPA is that it normalizes the data across all punters. So essentially, it looks at the game situation that the team faces before the punt and the situation it faces after the punt and analyzes the change between the two. We can see that since Harvin is in the negatives, meaning that the Steelers are usually in a better situation before his punts (assuming his punts will be average) than after.
While this is far from conclusive evidence that the Steelers need to move on from Harvin, it’s likely that they at least bring in some competition this offseason, similar to what they did with Braden Mann this season. Because when the offense punts as much as they have been (Harvin has 62, good for sixth in the league), you need a pretty good punter.
