Now that the Pittsburgh Steelers’ 2023 season is getting underway after the team finished above .500 but failed 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: TE Connor Heyward
Stock Value: Up
Reasoning: He caught all of two passes for four yards, but the season finale against the Baltimore Ravens may have been the finest game of Connor Heyward’s career. Regardless of how you want to label him positionally, he was a blocker last Sunday and an effective one.
Connor Heyward hasn’t yet turned into the heir apparent to Travis Kelce that we were all expecting when the Steelers drafted him. He also managed all of one carry on the season following talk in the offseason about him potentially doing that and other things more (then again, why would you when you’re already trying to feed Najee Harris and Jaylen Warren?).
But he’s finally begun to make more consistent strides as a blocker. The offense as a whole has really seemed to pick things up in that area over the past three games, particularly in terms of their physicality, but Heyward is definitely among them. The past three games mark likely the best stretch of his career as a blocker.
He seems most effective in the role of puller as the end man on the line of scrimmage, which I don’t think should hardly be surprising. There were a couple of notable examples of that against the Baltimore Ravens in the season finale.
Heyward’s lack of prototypical size is always going to limit him on the edge as a blocker, and as a receiver for that matter, and, well, let’s just say that the Steelers didn’t suddenly start trotting out the fullback position 20 times a game, either.
But putting him in these types of positions to succeed seems to be the way to go. Of course, put it on tape often enough, and defenses will begin to counter it, so it would be wise for the offense to start building tendency breakers around his end-around motion as a lead blocker.
Heyward caught nearly twice as many passes this year as he did last season, 23 to 12, but without much more yardage and without a touchdown. He had a couple of drops, as well. But on the whole, he serves his function as a niche player who is a jack of many trades. Last week that included recovering an onside kick as well.
