The Pittsburgh Steelers lost several key players to injuries last season, but one player that’s not talked about a lot as being a big loss is backup tight end Matt Spaeth.
Spaeth went down last year in training camp with a Lisfranc injury and as a result he needed surgery and missed the first 12 games of the season. Like or not, the Steelers running game suffered without him.
With Spaeth sidelined most of the season, the Steelers were forced to use David Paulson, Michael Palmer and David Johnson as second tight ends in addition to an occasional extra tackle. As you can see in the stats below, the Steelers running game was dismal when all three were on the field.
Now, I don’t want to give the appearance that this was 142 different running plays, as often times a combination of the three were on the field at the same time. I can tell you, however, that there were roughly 100 different running plays last season that did not include a combination of two or more of those three players. When you consider that the Steelers ran the ball nearly 400 times last season, you can see that at least one of those three players was on the field for 25% of those runs.
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