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I spent much of last offseason cheekily hate-touting Harris on Twitter, and while I might have to take an L on assuming that running things back in a still-shitty situation in Pittsburgh wouldn’t pose problems for his fantasy production as a second-year player, I think the reasoning behind my “Harris doesn’t suck” stance was well-grounded. To start, his team-relative efficiency metrics were really nice: he averaged 1.22 yards per carry more than the other runners on the team did (a 90th-percentile mark among backs in the last seven years), he posted a Box-Adjusted Efficiency Rating of 151.1% that ranks in the top-15 of all lead backs since 2016, and he produced a Relative Success Rate of 17.3% that is the single highest mark among team-leading runners in that same timeframe. It’s of course relevant that the other Steelers backs we’re comparing Harris to here were a sub-talented and low-volume group made up of Benny Snell, Kalen Ballage, and Anthony McFarland, but my general stance on inefficient runners in demonstrably bad situations is that extremely positive team-relative efficiency -- which Najee clearly produced that year -- is enough to earn the benefit of the doubt. The alternative is deciding which running backs are good and bad based largely on the quality of play-calling and blocking surrounding their rushing attempts and thereby contributing heavily to their raw efficiency numbers, which seems bad. Harris earned a ton of volume, which is often an indicator of talent, and he smashed the efficiency of the other players operating in the same offensive environment as him, so I’m not sure what else we could have hoped for given that we knew that environment to be bad.

Outside of team-relative numbers, Harris was solid but unspectacular in various other measures of running back play: he ranked 20th and 24th, respectively, in Juke Rate and Yards Created per Touch according to playerprofiler.com, and he ranked 29th in missed tackles forced per attempt (in the same range as players like Khalil Herbert, Austin Ekeler, Dalvin Cook, and Alvin Kamara) and 36th in yards after contact per attempt (around guys like Herbert, Christian McCaffrey, Miles Sanders, and Josh Jacobs) according to Pro Football Focus. His rate of Rushing Yards Over Expected per Attempt was -0.22, a negative mark well within the range of normal as it lands in the 46th percentile and among the rates posted by players widely considered good at football, such as 2017 Le’Veon Bell and 2021 Joe Mixon. I’m not here to argue that Harris was some sort of world-beater as a rookie, but “lol bro is ass, next trich” doesn’t quite capture reality either: he was fine. In my mind, if a player we previously understood to be good (unless you’re one of these abacus jockeys who declared Harris a bust before he ever took a snap on the basis of his status as a non-early declare) performs somewhere between fine and mediocre for a season, we should reserve stronger judgments until more evidence can be gathered.

Le’Veon Bell was the RB2 in 2017 while falling short of per-carry expectations to a similar degree as what Najee Harris did in 2021.

Enter 2022, where Harris played substantially worse than he did the year prior. His BAE Rating dropped to 83.6%, his RSR fell to -8.7%, and his RYOE per attempt dipped to -0.49, numbers all below the 33rd percentile historically. That mounting evidence of inefficiency would seem to indicate some inherent issues in Harris’ talent profile, but I also think he had even more reasons to be bad in 2022 than he did in 2021. The Steelers offensive line improved in the league-wide rankings but saw their raw run-blocking grade actually drop from the previous season, Harris entered the year with a Lisfranc injury that he suffered in the preseason and later dealt with oblique and hip injuries in the middle of the campaign, and the team’s transition from Ben Roethlisberger to Kenny Pickett at quarterback seems to have resulted in defenses respecting the Pittsburgh passing attack far less in 2022, as Najee went from seeing an average of 6.72 defenders in the box on his carries as a rookie to 7.21 as a sophomore, numbers that represent a transition from the 19th to the 80th percentile in difficulty of ground-based travel. He was hurt, playing behind a bad offensive line, and seeing greater pressure from opposing defenses, a trifecta of adverse circumstances that makes poor efficiency not surprising.

The bottom line is that we’ve never seen Harris in an NFL setting that was even vaguely conducive to efficient running, let alone actively helpful to that end. That’s not to say that he’s definitely good despite objectively poor on-field results as a pro, but I don’t think we can say he’s definitely bad either. One argument I’ve seen made against Najee is that the only circumstances in which we’ve seen him play well was as a member of a powerhouse program at Alabama where he benefited from an elite supporting that cast that held a talent advantage over nearly every team they played, and so the evidence we have of him playing poorly in the NFL and without those boosting factors is showing us who he really is. I understand that logic, but I don’t necessarily agree with it, essentially on the basis of the logic used in this string of tweets. I’ll rehash a bit here.

Consider two hypothetical running backs: player X played on a terrible college team where he was the lone bright spot on an offense with a bad quarterback, weak skill position weaponry, and a sieve of an offensive line that was consistently overmatched by the competition they faced on a weekly basis. Player Z played on an awesome college team where he operated as the do-it-all workhorse on a squad stocked with four- and five-star recruits that enjoyed a weekly talent advantage over their opponents that resulted in lesser defensive pressure on their stud running back. Player Z came by his production by making sound decisions in cushy circumstances at the line of scrimmage before exerting his athletic and physical dominance over second-level defenders, while player X often had to fight tooth and nail just to escape the backfield and give himself opportunities for big plays out in space.

In the NFL, both player X and player Z end up as workhorse runners on bad teams. Their quarterbacks don’t scare anybody, their skill position compatriots are solid but not elite, and their run-blocking units get dominated on a regular basis by talented defensive fronts that don’t have to respect the pass. Regardless of how we felt about the talent disparity between player X and player Z before their NFL careers started, it seems likely to me that player X would have an easier time transitioning to the professional game considering that he’s essentially been practicing in adverse circumstances similar to what he now deals with for the last three or four years in college, while it would be reasonable to expect player Z to experience some substantial growing pains as he adjusts not only to a higher level of competition but also to a completely different mix of factors than he’s ever been faced with on the field. Player Z might even be a more talented runner than player X in a vacuum, but player X has already developed the instincts for making split-second decisions on abandoning structure, taking the L on a doomed play, dealing with overwhelming pressure in the backfield, etc., that player Z has never been forced to develop. The on-field results from early on in these players’ careers might very well indicate that player X is “good” and player Z is “bad”, when the real distinction that should be drawn between them is much more a matter of experience and adaptability. If the situations were modified and both backs were drafted by teams with great quarterbacks and quality offensive lines, we might be having a completely different conversation about how player Z is a mistake-free ball-carrier who keeps his offense on schedule while player X is a hero-ball runner who regularly misses open holes while fighting ghosts in the backfield and unnecessarily bouncing to the outside. Styles make fights, and I think there’s a chance that Najee Harris -- our player Z -- has simply been in a fight through two seasons of his NFL career that just isn’t what his amateur experience prepared him for stylistically. A quick Twitter search indicates that the film grinders held his vision and decision-making skills in high regard at Alabama (see 1, 2, 3, 4, 5), so either Najee got worse since then or the circumstances in which he’s been asked to operate have changed.

Here's what the Steelers are getting with Najee Harris:
🔸 Vision
🔸 Nimble footwork
🔸 Power
🔸 Receiving ability

Steelers haven't had a complete back like this since Le'Veon Bell. All those traits on display below: pic.twitter.com/5KA5WRZTtz
— Daniel Valente (@StatsGuyDaniel) April 30, 2021

I can’t be positive which of those two explanations is more correct (though I know which one I lean toward), but we can look at historical examples of productive-but-inefficient young runners and apply insights gained from their career arcs to how we deal with Harris as a dynasty asset. Since the advent of the 16-game schedule in 1978, there have been 13 other backs who carried the ball at least 200 times (or at least paced for it) and averaged fewer than four yards per carry in each of their first two seasons (while also playing for only one team during that time, we want to select for players who weren’t moved on from by their original teams this early in their careers). In descending order of per-carry efficiency, those runners are Willis McGahee, Mario Bates, Matt Forte, William Green, Melvin Gordon, Andra Franklin, John Stephens, Leonard Fournette, Errict Rhett, Sammie Smith, Karim Abdul-Jabbar, Curtis Enis, and Ricky Bell.

To start, it’s worth pointing out that Harris is not the next Trent Richardson. Richardson averaged fewer than 3.6 yards per carry as a rookie, got traded from Cleveland to Indianapolis just weeks into his second season, and had his volume scaled way back while averaging less than 3.0 yards per carry on the Colts. Najee has never been as inefficient as Richardson was, still operated as a workhorse in Pittsburgh even after a slog of a rookie season, and is obviously still on the Steelers. The risk that he ends up out of the league in the next year, as Richardson was by the end of year three, is almost nonexistent. The only guys on this list did flunk out of the NFL prior to the expiration of their rookie contracts are Enis, who averaged 2.3 yards per carry in the midst of a year-three conversion to fullback, Smith, who received just 83 carries in his own third season, Franklin, who averaged 3.3 yards per carry on 224 attempts as a third-year guy, and Green, who got passed over in his third season by another runner in Lee Suggs who’d averaged over five yards per carry the year prior. Maybe the Steelers view Jaylen Warren as that guy, but I’m not counting on it.

Of the remaining nine players in this group, I’d say four qualify as busts that you would not have wanted to invest in in dynasty and five qualify as varying levels of hit for those willing to stick with them through rough early stretches. The former group is made up of Bates, Stephens, Rhett, and Abdul-Jabbar, none of whom posted a single season of even 12.0 PPR points per game or four yards per carry at any point in their careers -- despite being drafted in the second, first, second, and third rounds, respectively, all of them flamed out after receiving what ended up being undeserved volume early on.

Let’s go one-by-one through the five guys who would have rewarded patient dynasty gamers. Bell averaged an atrocious 3.35 yards per carry on Tampa Bay Buccaneers squads that went a combined 7-23 in his first two seasons (that was in the second and third years of the franchise’s existence, a time for which they have a pretty strong argument for being the worst team in NFL history) after they selected him with the first overall pick in the 1977 NFL Draft, but he temporarily made good on that choice by averaging 4.5 yards per carry on 283 totes when the team went 10-6 in 1979. He averaged a near-RB1-level 14.4 points per game that season, his last quality year in the league.

Only 60s kids will remember Ricky Bell running roughshod through the NFL Central back in 1979.

Fournette has of course never turned things around to be a reliably efficient runner, but he has multiple seasons of 4.5+ yards per carry and of RB2- and RB1-level production on his NFL resume after getting the same kind of “next Trent Richardson” nonsense early on that Harris (and Jonathan Taylor) has received. If Najee turned out to be Fournette, I think multiple seasons of 17+ points per game would keep his dynasty managers warm at night, especially at the RB14 prices it’ll currently run them (according to KeepTradeCut).

Similarly, Gordon has rarely produced with high-end efficiency but also stuck around long enough to post three seasons of 15+ points per game (including five of 12+) and three seasons of 4.5+ yards per carry after year two, easily providing value to those willing to stick with him through the slow-going San Diego seasons that served up touchdown struggles on top of efficiency woes.

Forte is an obvious success story here, turning a 3.78-yard per-carry average in his first two seasons into seven RB2-level seasons, five RB1-level seasons, and three 4.5+ yards-per-carry seasons during the remainder of a 10-year career that saw him establish himself as one of the best all-purpose backs in the league. Those jumping ship from his dynasty bandwagon after he volume-slogged his way to respectable fantasy numbers on dog shit Bears offenses as a 23- and 24-year old would have regretted such a move.

Finally, we have McGahee, the most dubious Harris analog among these success stories due to the ACL tear that wiped away his entire rookie season and probably contributed to subdued efficiency during his introductory NFL action. Still, McGahee bounced back to post two RB2-level seasons, one RB1-level season, and several seasons above 4.0 and 4.5 yards per carry during the rest of his career.

Considering the talent breakdown of the rest of the backs in Pittsburgh, I don’t see any reason why we should expect Harris to receive a significantly scaled back workload in year three. It’s probably a good thing for his long-term outlook that he received “only” 313 touches last season after handling nearly 400 as a rookie, and after the Steelers added nothing of consequence (they technically signed FCS guys Alfonzo Graham and Darius Hagans to UDFA contracts) to a running back room that had another UDFA in Warren (who, to be fair, I believe is a good player) as its clear number-two a season ago, I’d anticipate another year of 300-or-so touches for Harris in 2023. Offensive coordinator Matt Canada was brought back to peddle his incompetencies for yet another season, which is a bummer, but any natural progression experienced by Kenny Pickett and any talent-based improvement on the offensive line (a unit that was bolstered this offseason via several free agent additions and the selection of Georgia tackle Broderick Jones with the 14th pick in the NFL Draft) can only help Harris going forward. Add a return to health for Najee himself, and I wouldn’t be shocked to see a bounceback to RB1-type production in what is shaping up to be a prove-it year in 2023, both from a real life and fantasy perspective. In the latter regard, you won’t be able to hop on the train at current prices if a healthy Harris in the best situation of his NFL career is able to crest the four yard-per-carry threshold while seeing high-end volume and producing 15+ points per game. As of now, though, there’s value to be had considering the high-end RB2 prices that Najee shares can be had for in startups and on the trade market, so unless you think he’s more William Green than Melvin Gordon, I don’t see why you wouldn’t buy the dip and stay patient.