Kaleb Johnson Camp Update — August 16: Two Carries While the Fourth Back Got Ten
2026 NFL Season · Monday, Aug 17
Kaleb Johnson got two carries for three yards, late in the preseason opener, while Lew Nichols took a team-high ten carries and scored. One beat writer reads it as roster trouble. The June skepticism about his path is aging well, which is bad news.
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Kaleb Johnson carried the ball twice for three yards Thursday night, and both carries came late in the game. In the same 28 to nine win over Green Bay, with Jaylen Warren and Rico Dowdle both sitting, Lew Nichols took the team-high 10 carries for 36 yards and a touchdown, plus a second score wiped out by penalty, per steelers.com and Parker Abate at Steeler Nation. Abate's read, via Yardbarker, is blunt: this looks like roster trouble for Johnson.
The June preview did not sugarcoat this player, so the recap is quick. Johnson was a third-round pick a year ago who finished his rookie season with 28 carries, 69 yards, one catch, and three weeks as a healthy scratch, one of the quietest rookie lines a back with his draft capital has posted. We said the college profile, a downhill one-cut runner with real college production, was the entire reason to care, and that the situation had turned against him: a brand-new staff under Mike McCarthy with no attachment to the pick, and the Dowdle signing dropping him to third on the depth chart at best. Our line was that the talent bought him a year and the depth chart was spending it. The things we said to watch were the camp pecking order and whether the new staff would trust him with early-down work.
Thursday was the first live answer, and it was the wrong one. A preseason opener with both veterans resting is precisely the stage a team hands to a young back it wants to evaluate. Pittsburgh handed that stage to Nichols, 10 carries in the flow of the game, and gave Johnson garbage-time scraps. One game, low stakes, and preseason usage can whipsaw week to week. But the June thesis was that the path to touches was hard to see, and the first depth-chart evidence of August says it may be harder than that: he is not just behind Warren and Dowdle, he spent Thursday behind Lew Nichols.
Does the June read hold? CONFIRMED, and not the happy kind. The skeptical read, that the new staff has no investment in him and the runway is close to gone, matches everything the opener showed.
The checkable things for next week: his carry count and timing against the Jets on Friday, and whether he gets a single series ahead of Nichols, because the June caveat said this is a stash you cut by September if the path stays closed, and that clock is running. We'll check next Sunday.
_Data via nflverse._
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