Steelers' Najee Harris has huge opportunity for breakout game vs. Cowboys

Val Dewar

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Steelers' Najee Harris has huge opportunity for breakout game vs. Cowboys image

Numbers can be deceiving, but anyone who has watched the Pittsburgh Steelers play in 2024 knows that the run game is far from as effective as Steelers Nation expected.

The Steelers are tenth in the NFL in yards per game on the ground, which seems good on paper, yet a further look at the stats — and the film — paints a different picture.

No running back has scored a touchdown this year. Fans with decent memories will recall that this was the case last year too; it took until the fourth quarter of Week 7 in 2023 for the team to score a rushing touchdown of any sort.

At least this year, Justin Fields is running it in, and he's also contributed a lot to the ground game in terms of yardage with 145, which has helped beef up the team's per-game ranking. Without that, Pittsburgh would rank bottom-10

That cannot be the case if the Steelers are to keep winning. Arthur Smith’s offense is entirely predicated on pounding the rock to set up play-action to hopefully get George Pickens open deep.

It is a minor miracle that Fields has made so many deep completions — Pickens is tied for seventh in receptions of 20-plus yards — but it also goes to show just how much better this offense can be if the run game begins to click.

The Steelers are tied for 32nd in the league in rushing success rate on first down this year with an abysmal 21.7%. Expanding the stat to every down does not improve it much, only jumping to eighth worst in the league.

The good news is, the defenses Najee and Co. have been facing are strong against the run; none of them sit outside the top half of the league in rushing efficiency allowed.

However, this advanced metric may not correlate perfectly to actual production, as the Colts are 31st in the league in rush yards given up per game.

The Steelers' Week 5 opponent, the Dallas Cowboys, were thought to have a good defense before the year started, but through the first quarter of the season Dallas is 25th in total defense, 26th in rush defense, and 27th in scoring defense.

With the other good news of the week that Isaac Seumalo is set to play his first game of the season on Sunday and shore up a depleted offensive line, the stars have all but aligned for Najee Harris to have his best game of the season against the Cowboys, which will hopefully set the tone for the following games, too.

Val Dewar

Val Dewar Photo

Val was initiated into Steelers Nation from the moment he was born — his first memory is a game vs. New England from when "Slash" was QB — and doing sports writing has always been a dream career for him. In 2022 he broke into the industry by writing about combat sports for Cageside Press, and now has the opportunity to continue that work with TSN as an MMA writer, as well as get his feet wet on the Steelers beat.