For the second time in three games, no thanks to Jaylen Warren, the Pittsburgh Steelers emerged victorious despite losing the turnover battle. That was particularly impressive against a high-octane Washington Commanders team that protects the ball well. Making it all the more impressive is the fact that they lost one ball on the doorstep of a touchdown. Warren had the ball stripped away from him at the 1-yard line, though that spurred some debate.
Not for former Steelers DL Chris Hoke, however. While even the CBS broadcast team argued that Warren should have had his forward progress blow the play dead, Hokes argues the Steelers can’t have it both ways. Warren and Najee Harris benefit too much from the late whistles to complain about that.
“If you’re going to blow the whistle when forward progression stops, you’re going to take away a third of Najee Harris’ yardage”, Hoke said Sunday on the KDKA Steelers Extra Point postgame show. “You can’t have it both ways. You can’t say, ‘Oh, you can’t blow the whistle and Jaylen Warren wouldn’t have fumbled the ball’ and then not allow Najee Harris to continue to push forward because there are times when it looks like he’s stopped and he rolls off for another four, five, six yards”.
“You can’t have it both ways. It was a good play by the Commanders”, Hoke insisted, even though it resulted in a gut punch for Jaylen Warren and the Steelers. “To rip that ball out and to drag that out of there, I mean you’ve got to give them credit. That was a heck of an effort by [Quan] Martin and [Jeremy] Chinn to get that ball out”.
If there has been one flaw in Warren’s career to this point, it has been ball security. He even had to carry around a football “baby” during his rookie training camp with the Steelers. This marked his first fumble of the 2024 season on 69 touches, but he fumbled four times last year. On 384 career touches, he now has six fumbles, or one per 64 touches.
For comparison, Najee Harris has five career fumbles for the Steelers on 1,152 touches. And that includes a “fumble” on a nonsense desperation lateral play at the end of a game. Now, Harris is one of the more secure runners in the league, so that’s not a fair comparison.
But this is becoming a theme for Jaylen Warren. It’s not even his first fumble in the red zone for the Steelers. You might recall the last one got some attention because of Diontae Johnson’s lack of effort on the play.
But the real story is the fact that the Steelers normally can’t afford these kinds of mistakes. Perhaps yesterday revealed a different story, though, because Russell Wilson and company came back and erased the potential lost touchdown from Warren’s fumble. Now 2-1 when losing the turnover battle, do the Steelers finally have an offense that doesn’t have to play perfect?
