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: OLB Nick Herbig
Stock Value: Up
Reasoning: The rookie outside linebacker played a whopping two snaps on defense last week against the Seattle Seahawks. He notched a sack, a forced fumble, and a fumble recovery for his efforts all on one play, his third sack of the year, producing very efficiently in limited opportunities.
Nepotism doesn’t feel like much of a problem when they produce results like Nick Herbig, the outside linebacker out of Wisconsin. The rookie fourth-round draft pick has been a true find, even if it’s often hard to find him on the field.
Though he’s played just 178 defensive snaps this season, he has 27 tackles (granted, a number of them on special teams), including five tackles for loss, three sacks, two forced fumbles, and one fumble recovery. Yet the only game in which he has played 20 or more snaps was the game in which both T.J. Watt and Alex Highsmith were injured, against the New England Patriots.
He did have a career-high seven tackles in that game, which ended a run in which he had a tackle for loss in five out of six games. And he had seen double-digit snaps in four consecutive weeks. Yet for whatever reason, he only played two defensive snaps against the Seattle Seahawks on Sunday.
Part of the reason would be that the Seahawks didn’t log a ton of snaps, about 50 for the game. They didn’t sustain many drives, including four three-and-outs. Herbig produced one of them—really a one-and-out—when he recorded a strip sack on first down, recovering his own forced fumble of Seahawks QB Geno Smith. T.J. Watt had to show him how to celebrate properly.
It was a big play that allowed the offense to turn around and put the Steelers up by two possessions while taking two-and-a-half minutes off the clock. Seattle responded with a field goal to make it a seven-point game once again, but the offense was able to close on its final possession with just 2:01 remaining.
Leading up to that fumble, Seattle had scored on four of its six previous drives, including two touchdowns, though it had gone three-and-out in two of the previous three with a field goal sandwiched in between.
As for Herbig, well, it may be hard not to play him more next year. There were some questions about how he would hold up at the NFL level due to his smaller stature, and perhaps he may be somewhat limited if ever asked to play 900 snaps in a year, but he has proven that he can provide a big impact in a short space. A pinch hitter who can hit a dinger.
