An unfortunate theme of the last two seasons has been slow starts in the running game for the Pittsburgh Steelers. Today’s goal is to look at some numbers and see if there are any takeaways for future improvements.
First, here’s how teams fared in the entirety of the 2022 (x-axis) and 2023 (y-axis) seasons in success via nflfastR (success = expected points added > 0):
Here we see Pittsburgh was above league mean each season, among several solid teams. Particularly in 2022, with 46.0 percent success (fourth-best), compared to 41 percent last season (11th).