While Roman Wilson significantly outsnapped Calvin Austin III on Sunday, Gerry Dulac isn’t ready to say that’s a long-term change. Wilson played a career-high 37 snaps, playing at least 50 percent for just the second time. Austin played just 19 snaps, his lowest total of the season. It’s also the fewest snaps he’s played in a game in which he wasn’t injured since 2023. So why did that happen, and what does that mean going forward?
Appearing on 102.5 WDVE, Gerry Dulac of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette likened the snap distribution between Wilson and Austin to that of Jaylen Warren and Kenneth Gainwell in the backfield. “They go into a game with certain players for certain packages, and the assistant coaches are the ones who rotate the players into the game”, he said. “Kenneth Gainwell was a guy, before the game, designated for some of those packages. And when they keep running him over and over, he ends up in the game more than Jaylen Warren”.
Dulac, who hosts a weekly radio program with Calvin Austin, speculates, in other words, that the Steelers may have simply encountered game situations that dictated they use more packages designated for Roman Wilson than for Austin. That sounds plausible enough, though it doesn’t seem likely.
The Steelers came into the game using Wilson heavily and Austin sparingly. And generally, teams start out a game with a “script”, a set of plays that they want to run. According to our charting, Austin didn’t even play until the Steelers’ 18th offensive snap late in the first quarter. By then, Wilson had already played 11 snaps.
And there’s also the fact that, for the majority of the game, Austin mostly played when Wilson played. Each of his last 10 snaps came with Wilson also on the field, with Wilson playing eight more snaps in that same timeframe than Austin did.
I will say this. For whatever reason, Calvin Austin’s playing time concentrated heavily between the end of the first half, in hurry-up mode, and the middle of the third quarter. He only played one snap after that, and four before it. Perhaps they wanted him on the field for hurry-up situations.
But here’s another thing: Austin barely played when Aaron Rodgers was still in the game before the two-minute warning. He first checked in for a third-and-long play, stayed in for one snap, then returned for the next third down. In all, nine of his 19 snaps came in the final two minutes of the first half.
Now, I don’t know if Roman Wilson played more than Calvin Austin in this game just because the Steelers liked this particular matchup for him. But I don’t really see any clear patterns in usage that would suggest game circumstances dictated this snap distribution. For the most part, other than in two-minute situations, he wasn’t involved in the initial game plan. He played on third downs, primarily. Will next week’s game look anything like this one? Who knows? By this time next week, we could be talking about Marquez Valdes-Scantling.
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