If you rewind to the 2000s era of Pittsburgh Steelers football, there were plenty of examples of good players waiting for their starting opportunity behind All-Pro or Pro Bowl players. It made for a great system then, but players are becoming starters earlier and earlier these days as teams look to maximize cheap rookie contracts to help manage the salary cap.
If there’s one position on the team where the Steelers are set with their starting group, it’s outside linebacker. T.J. Watt is a perennial All-Pro and one of the best players in the NFL, and Alex Highsmith has continued to ascend into a top 20 edge defender as well. But they have a third edge player who is young and hungry in second-year OLB Nick Herbig. What a great situation for him to be in.
In terms of having excellent teachers around him, Herbig hit the jackpot. But veterans aren’t always going to go out of their way to ensure a young player is learning. It is on Herbig to make sure he is maximizing his time with Watt, and it seems like he is doing just that.
“Whenever we’d have off days, I used to text him, like ‘Bro, when are you going in?'” Herbig said in a one-on-one interview with Missi Matthews via the Steelers’ YouTube channel. “He’d tell me, so I would try to match up when I go in so I could do whatever he’s doing on the off day.”
They are separated by seven years, but Herbig and Watt have a shared bond via the University of Wisconsin. Nick Herbig trained with Watt in Wisconsin this offseason and discussed some of what they were doing together.
“We did a lot of body maintenance stuff, like taking care of our body,” Herbig told Matthews. “We would warm up for an hour doing little stuff like our shoulder, our knees, ankles, hips, just everything. So just getting that full package and seeing what an All-Pro Defensive Player of the Year guy does to get himself ready for camp. ‘Cause I’m not gonna be with T.J. forever, so just stuff I can take with me as my career goes on…I’ll have stuff like that to keep in my back pocket.”
The extra preparation and work with guys like Watt and Highsmith appear to have paid off. Herbig reportedly showed up to camp in the best shape of his life with a body that looks much more like an edge defender than he did a year ago.
Last year, Herbig was the fourth OLB on the depth chart with Markus Golden on the roster. Golden briefly reunited with the team at training camp after some injuries at the position, but he subsequently retired. Herbig is the unquestioned third in the rotation now and his usage will go up as a result.
He only played 191 snaps on defense in his rookie season, but he was highly efficient with three sacks, five tackles for loss, and two forced fumbles. His forced fumble against the Seattle Seahawks was the big turning point of that game. He showed a lot of promise, so his extra work with Watt and a full offseason of preparation will bring higher expectations for Nick Herbig this season.
