The Steelers turned around a shoddy start to its 2022 season with a reaffirmed commitment to the running game.
Najee Harris was a beneficiary of a heavy zone running scheme that allowed for a second-half surge. He totaled 361 yards and 3.34 yards per carry with one touchdown pre-bye week and 673 yards and 4.1 per carry with six touchdowns post-bye. Harris also rushed for 78.6 yards per game in the Steelers' seven wins pre-bye, compared to the 61.5 averaged in the two losses after the bye in 2022.
Jaylen Warren's emergence and increased usage post-bye in 2022 was also a factor in why the Steelers had one of the best rushing offenses in the NFL in the second half of 2022. Their 146 yards per game were two yards more than the most yards rushed for in a single game as a team through the first eight games before the bye week.
The Steelers' rushing attack has been lackluster to begin 2023, and if the offense is going to improve in this season's post-bye, it will have to get that similar lift it experienced post-bye in 2022.
"We obviously evaluated everything," Canada said Thursday at the UPMC Rooney Sports Complex. "I'm not going to get into exactly what we did or didn't do, but we certainly tried to -- whenever the bye comes in a season, it gives you a chance to take however many games, last year eight games, this year five games, and you can kind of really analyze where you're at and some things you want to do better. It's all aspects of our game, and in the run game we did that as well."
The current running backs room is undergoing a shift. The days of a bell cow, true No. 1 workhorse a la LeVeon Bell are in the rear-view, and the Steelers are more than content with allowing Harris, Warren, and a returning Anthony McFarland to have their own roles within the offense.
Harris has carried the ball 63 times to Warren's 34 thus far. However, Warren's 21 receptions on 25 targets -- second and third among Steelers, respectively -- have somewhat leveled the touches to 68-55 in favor of Harris through five games.
Adding McFarland could cut into both backs' touches going forward, but that change doesn't seem as scary as one initially might imagine.
Canada said the Steelers had plans for McFarland going into Week 1 against the 49ers, but McFarland's nagging knee injury de-railed that plan. McFarland had a strong training camp in Latrobe and appeared to carve out a role despite heavy work loads going to Harris and Warren. Unfortunately, McFarland was placed on injured reserve just before the Week 2 game against the Browns. He is set to return Sunday against the Rams.
"Ant gives us a lot of play making ability as he's getting back from injury and seeing where he's at," Canada said. "He had a nice little role in the first game and it didn't go quite as well as we all hoped. Some of those things weren't magnified in how the game came down. He's a different dimension to our running back room."
The offense has not produced a rushing touchdown through five games, and the Steelers' 80.4 rushing yards per game rank 28th in the NFL entering Week 7. These results come partly from the struggles from the offensive line, which have become compounded with James Daniels missing playing time because of a groin injury.
Before Thursday's practice, Warren said the Steelers made adjustments on their alignments, and those will enable the Steelers to help set up blocks and work as a team efficiently. He said he didn't notice anything different from a wholesale perspective in what the Steelers have installed for this week's game, but there are "little tweaks" within the plays.
"We just looked at the tendencies we had throughout the season," Warren said. "Last year it was the first eight games, this was the first five. Yeah, pretty similar, similar stuff. ... It's a lot of (alignment) that's involved with what we have put in place. What ever that looks like, what ever adjustment we need with the preparation inside of practice. We'll see what it does."
On Wednesday, Harris acknowledged he met with Mason Cole to watch tape and go over the running game and how the backs and offensive line can have more synergy going forward. Canada said that was nothing new to Harris, and the presentation of their findings was more about what they saw and what they thought of the pre-bye performances.
"Yeah, very similar to last year," Canada said. "Najee and I met last year in the bye and looked at all his runs and what we can do better. It goes with Naj or the quarterback or anything else. All the focus goes there and there's a lot of pieces to it, but there's a lot to make sure that we're on the same page. There's no question about Naj's desire to win, desire to be great, desire to be a leader, desire to be on the same page, That wasn't anything new from what he did a year ago, and hopefully we can continue to grow and get better, we're counting on that and trying to get ourselves back to where we want to be."
Canada would not disclose specifics of what the Steelers are going to implement in the post-bye, but there at least has been a willingness to make changes going into the final 12 games of the season. It benefitted the Steelers in 2022, and it will remain to be seen if it helps net the same or similar result in 2023.
"Obviously we hope so," Canada said. "Obviously we try to -- we're going to tweak things. If there's something that helps us, we're going to do that. We're not going to talk to you guys exactly about what we're going to make tweaks on. We've got to be better in a lot of different things. It's not just one little area in the run game. We've certainly looked at them all and we've tried to evaluate where some of the positive and were there's some negatives and where's something that's just a bit here and there we might be able to get to a positive."
