PITTSBURGH -- Najee Harris felt it on the sideline in Houston on Sunday. He felt it in the locker room at halftime.
The Pittsburgh Steelers' offense wasn't playing with the right mentality, and he needed to change it. That's why, trailing 16-0 when play resumed, Harris refused to be brought down on the first play of the third quarter.
Even with seven defenders in the box and the first contact coming 3 yards behind the line of scrimmage, Harris took the ball 15 yards down the field, eluding ankle tackles and defenders with sheer willpower and a well-timed spin move. Harris gained 11 yards over expected, according to NFL Next Gen Stats, and 18.4 yards after contact.
"Me, as a person who wants to spark offense, sometimes I don't like saying it, I like showing it in a way," Harris said Wednesday. "So I try to be that guy and show it. That's why in the game we came out there, and I wanted to just emphasize that right now. We're just playing soft. We're not firing off, we're not making no plays. So I try to be that guy. They feed off of me."
Running back Jaylen Warren confirmed as much in the locker room after the loss, praising Harris after a 71-yard, 14-carry game, his best output of the season.
"Najee was hot today," Warren said. "I even told him, I was like, 'Hey bro, even if the coach says it's me in, I'm going to let you eat because you're hot today. I'm going to let you do your thing.' ... It gets me hyped up personally. I get more hyped -- him getting a 25-yard run -- than I do if I got the run. I like seeing him eat. We feed off of it. That's our workhorse."
A year ago, the Steelers leaned on the run game to get them on track. This time around -- especially with a tenuous quarterback situation as quarterback Kenny Pickett works through early-season inconsistencies and tries to play through a bone bruise in his left knee -- it's again up to Harris and the run game to establish the offensive identity that continues to elude the Steelers early in recent seasons.
"We've just got to be better at it," center Mason Cole said of running the ball. "We've got to be more efficient, more consistent, so we don't get in circumstances where we don't run the ball."
Though this year's team is 2-2 through four weeks, the offensive numbers are worse than this point a year ago, when Tomlin benched Mitch Trubisky in favor of Pickett in an effort to give the offense a spark.
The Steelers are averaging 15.5 points per game, down from 18.5 at the same mark last year. The total yards per game are also down from 278.8 to 263.0. The offensive production in the red zone also declined from scoring touchdowns on 67% of red zone trips to 40% this season. And through four weeks, Steelers quarterbacks have been sacked 11 times compared to just eight at this point last year, and the total QBR dropped from 44.3 to 29.2.
"We've had these spurts where we look good, and we're not doing this soon enough in games," Cole said after Sunday's loss. "We're not functioning efficiently. I think we're waiting on splash plays and when we don't get 'em, we're not converting third downs, and it's just inefficient, bad ball."
With 31.3% of drives resulting in a three-and-out and 47.9% of drives ending without a first down, ranking 31st and 32nd in the NFL (ESPN Stats & Information), respectively, the Steelers' offense is sputtering.
The team already has a blueprint to get back to the physical mentality of last year's late playoff push, and it tapped into it less than a year ago in a 16-13 win against the Ravens in Week 17.
"The personality we need to play with is the mentality that we had last year against the Ravens," Harris said. "I think that mentality is where we need to be. We did not play with that mentality last week, truthfully, to be honest with you guys. I was frustrated about that, too. Just looking at the film, our mentality as an offense just wasn't good at all."
Harris rushed for 111 yards on 22 attempts in that 2022 win, while Warren had 76 yards on 12 carries. Harris also had a receiving touchdown, while Warren had three catches for 22 yards. That was Harris' lone 100-yard rushing game of the 2022 season and his second-highest yards per attempt average.
"We were dominating the box," Harris said of that game. "Whatever was in front of us, we dominated. We dominated the line of scrimmage. We dominated runs. We made plays. That needs to be our football. We have to be a dominant team. That's just our mentality. We want to be that, and it just takes time, I guess."
A year ago, it took nine weeks. Once healed from a training camp foot injury, Harris averaged 18.2 carries and 74.8 yards per game over the final nine games, up from 13.5 and 45 in the first eight weeks. That momentum, though, didn't carry over to this season.
Harris is averaging 12.25 carries and 52.5 yards per game and 4.29 yards per carry. As a team, the Steelers rank 29th in the league with 78.75 rushing yards per game and in the bottom eight teams with 3.6 yards per carry.
Part of the problem, players and coaches have echoed throughout the season, is consistently executing the plays called and staying committed to the run game. The team was running the ball well in the third quarter against Houston -- 12 carries for 63 yards, and Harris was averaging 6.1 yards per carry -- when the Steelers elected to go for it on fourth-and-1 from the 33. Instead of running the ball, the Steelers came out in a shotgun formation, and Pickett injured his knee when he bailed from the pocket and scrambled into a sack. Tomlin explained the decision Tuesday, saying the team didn't have access to its jumbo package because of injuries, but there was still some frustration among the players that the Steelers didn't try to run the ball when it had been going well.
"I think there's times where we run the ball really well, and then one bad or negative run will scare us away from it and we're behind the chains and we're trying to catch up and you get in bad situations," Cole said after the game. "So we just have to be more consistent across the board. We're just not good enough consistently, and it's killing us right now."
On Wednesday, Cole reiterated that while he wanted to run the ball on that play, the bigger, underlying issue is the team's consistent lack of execution.
"At the end of the day, the play that's called, we got to block it, we got to execute it," Cole said. "So it's not the playcall, it's the execution 95% of the time."
To help with that, Tomlin is emphasizing physicality in practice this week, practicing with pads on Wednesday for the first time in at least two weeks. Spearheaded by Harris and other leaders, the team also met earlier this week as a group to discuss playing with more heart and physicality. But the test to see if the Steelers are truly embracing the changes can't come until they take the field Sunday against the Ravens at home.
"This game, it's a challenge to see who else is going to be that person," Harris said. "It can't just keep being one person. It has to be more people. So it's a challenge to the receiver room to have that guy, O-line room, have that guy, tight end room, have that guy. We need to be, we have to be that. Especially in this conference."