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Steelers center Kendrick Green and offensive tackle Chukwuma Okorafor take a break between drills during practice Tuesday, Aug. 24, 2021, at UPMC Rooney Sports Complex.
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Why analytics say the Steelers' offensive line is getting too much credit yet also too much blame

Matt Freed/Post-Gazette

Why analytics say the Steelers' offensive line is getting too much credit yet also too much blame

The Steelers’ offensive line is not to blame for Ben Roethlisberger’s lacking production this season. At least not as far as Pro Football Focus’s controversial individual grades are concerned.

The scouting website has dogged the veteran quarterback’s performance all season, consistently ranking him among the NFL’s worst on a week-to-week basis. His season grade of 58.4 through five weeks currently stacks up 28th among signal callers with at least 100 drop backs in 2021.

Not good, and not a mistake, despite the protestations of Roethlisberger’s many fans. Last season, many of them sought to excuse his mediocre grades by blaming the receivers for their many drops, which do not actually count against him in the grading system.

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This season, the inexperienced line has been the target of their ire as it has admittedly surrendered more pressure than Roethlisberger has been used to seeing in many recent years.

Steelers offensive tackle Zach Banner works through drills during practice, Thursday, Sept. 30, 2021, at UPMC Rooney Sports Complex.
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Analyst Brad Spielberger views that kind of talk as deflection from the more pressing problem, which is that Roethlisberger can’t move as well as he used to and hasn’t been as consistently sharp on intermediate and longer throws as he once was.

“Ben Roethlisberger is the issue with this offense,” Spielberger said by phone Tuesday. “To be very reductive and very simplistic about it, yep, the line certainly could be better. There are certainly young players that need to get better and stop making mistakes and things of that nature. But, no, the reason the offense is bad is that the quarterback is bad.”

In fact, Roethlisberger ranks fourth among that aforementioned cohort with 10 throws graded by PFF as turnover-worthy this season. And he ranks just 14th in what PFF refers to as “big-time throws,” which grade out among the best in the league in a given week.

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The pass blocking, by contrast, has consistently earned solid marks. The line’s grade of 72.3 in that area currently ranks sixth in the NFL. That’s slightly worse than it’s been with more veteran units in recent seasons, but still nowhere near the mushy middle of the NFL, let alone the bottom rungs.

And Spielberger doesn’t feel those grades are inflated by the rapid-fire nature of the passing game. Over the past two seasons, Roethlisberger has gotten the ball out faster than the bulk of the league’s quarterbacks.

That doesn’t leave much blocking work for the line to do on many snaps. Even the best pass rush will have trouble getting to a quarterback in fewer than three seconds, regardless of how good or bad the blocking is.

So while that strategy may help keep Roethlisberger clean, it’s not necessarily hiding major structural issues with the blocking that has improved significantly since posting grades of 62.1 against Buffalo and 63.4 against Las Vegas over the first couple of weeks.

Steelers running back Najee Harris talks with tight end Zach Gentry during practice, Friday, Oct. 15, 2021, at UPMC Rooney Sports Complex.
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“If the ball gets out that quickly, we’re probably just going to give a zero grade,” Spielberger said. “It doesn’t mean nothing, but they essentially did their job. They weren’t really able to have a significant impact on this particular snap, just by nature of what the play was and what the objective of the play was.”

Run blocking has been a different story. Even as the ground game has been praised for appearing to get on track in recent weeks, the blocking grades have been among the worst in the NFL. For the season, the Steelers’ overall mark is 49.8, which ranks 31st ahead of only Las Vegas.

Sunday against Denver, that number was even worse at 45.5. This despite rookie running back Najee Harris registering the first 100-yard performance of his career.

Here, the opposite of the quarterback-line dynamic is at play. Just as the line is shouldering too much blame for Roethlisberger’s struggles from an analytics perspective, it may be getting too much of the credit for getting the ground attack on track.

Harris actually ranks ninth in the NFL in yards after contact, one of PFF’s leading statistics for measuring a back’s effectiveness. That puts him well behind Tennessee’s Derrick Henry and Cleveland’s Nick Chubb but within 100 yards after contact of everyone in front of him on the list.

His overall rushing grade of 68.3 isn’t quite as good; it ranks 40th in the NFL. But Spielberger has still been impressed by what Harris has been able to do behind a line that he feels has potential, but hasn’t nearly reached it yet.

“He really is creating yards by himself,” Spielberger said. “He is getting hit, either in the backfield or before the line of scrimmage or also in space as well. It all applies. And he is able to break those tackles and gain yards after the initial contact on most plays.

“They are going to get better running the football from an offensive line standpoint, but right now, it is a lot of Najee Harris doing a lot of the heavy lifting.”

Adam Bittner: abittner@post-gazette.com and Twitter @fugimaster24.

First Published: October 15, 2021, 10:30 a.m.
Updated: October 15, 2021, 11:48 a.m.

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