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: RB Najee Harris
Stock Value: Up
Reasoning: The third-year running back has been a workhorse during the Steelers’ three-game winning streak to end the season. He needed 77 rushing yards to hit 1,000 for the season and got 112 instead. In doing so, he posted consecutive 100-yard rushing games for the first time in his career. He also set a new career high with his eighth rushing touchdown, half of which have come in the past three games.
Head coach Mike Tomlin said after yesterday’s win that Najee Harris’ performance in the game was an example of “why we went to Tuscaloosa to get him”, referring to the location of Alabama’s Crimson Tide football program. They drafted him in the first round in 2021, and Harris has at times displayed the bell-cow qualities that they sought in him.
The unearthing of Jaylen Warren last season was a serendipitous and advantageous development that took much of the burden off Harris, but it’s been the veteran’s hot hand they’ve been riding down the stretch during a three-game winning streak to end the season.
Over the final three games, he recorded 72 rush attempts for 312 yards and four touchdowns, averaging 4.33 yards per attempt. For the first time in his career, he will complete a season averaging at least 4.0 yards per carry as well. All told, he has 255 rushes for 1,035 yards and eight rushing touchdowns.
And he capped it with one of the better performances of his career, perhaps, in a game in which the Steelers really needed him. In a game in which Warren struggled, fumbling multiple times and finishing with 33 rushing yards on nine attempts plus 17 receiving yards on five catches.
In the finale, Harris finished with a 57.7 run success rate, which is more than respectable, meaning that his rushing attempts yielded a successful play for the offense based on the down and distance. Yet he did it all without a run longer than 15 yards in spite of the fact that he has among the most explosive rushing plays among running backs this year, only Jahmyr Gibbs and Christian McCaffrey with more.
Steelers fans very frequently want to make it about Harris versus Warren, but it seems rather clear that the best solution is a healthy combination of both. Especially in games in which one struggles more than the other and his tag-team partner picks up the slack. In other games, it had been Warren picking up the slack. Yesterday, and for the past few weeks, it certainly has been Harris.
