Kaleb Johnson Camp Update — August 23: The Grades Say No Burst

Kaleb Johnson got on the field against the Jets on Friday, and the review was not kind: limited effectiveness, lacking burst, unable to make defenders miss. That is Josh Carney's assessment in his positional grades at Steelers Depot after the 17-to-nothing loss, in a running back group Carney graded C-minus overall. No counting line for Johnson appears in the grades — the published carries went five each to Jaylen Warren and Rico Dowdle in their Pittsburgh debuts, three to Lew Nichols and two to rookie Eli Heidenreich, whose blitz pickup drew specific praise. So a week after Johnson's two garbage-time carries against Green Bay, the second audition produced a qualitative thumbs-down rather than a workload.

Back in June we said the college profile was the whole reason to care and the situation had turned against him — a new staff with no attachment to last year's third-round pick, and a depth chart that starts with Warren and Dowdle. We also said the runway was short. It is now one game long: Thursday's finale at Buffalo is the last football before rosters cut to 53 on Sunday, August thirtieth. The competition for the depth spots is not hypothetical — Nichols out-carried him in the opener, and Heidenreich is showing the special-teams-adjacent skills, like blitz pickup, that tend to decide the last running back job. What Johnson needed this month was a night that forced the new staff to see the downhill runner Iowa saw. Two games in, no such night has appeared in any reporting we can attribute.

The checkable things this week: whether Johnson gets meaningful early touches Thursday against Buffalo, and — the real one — whether his name is on the 53 on Sunday. June said this was a stash you cut by September if the path stayed closed; cut day is the deadline on that sentence. We'll check after cut day.

_Data via nflverse._