“I had lunch with Nick [Herbig] in March out there in Scottsdale,” Mike McCarthy said after Tuesday’s practice.
When a head coach makes a point to meet with you for lunch during the owners meetings, it usually means something. That was the case for Nick Herbig, as Mike McCarthy revealed a March sit-down that now looks like a clear precursor to Herbig’s $100 million extension.
The extension was announced within two hours of McCarthy’s media session.
His new contract wasn’t known at the time, but Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s Gerry Dulac shared how the Steelers view Herbig for this upcoming 2026 season.
“Are they going to keep three guys if they sign Nick Herbig through 2027? I doubt it. They want to use [Herbig] more,” Dulac said via Post-Gazette Sports on YouTube. “McCarthy said today he had lunch with Nick Herbig while he was in Phoenix for the NFL owners meetings. And I think that’s an important, a significant sign because they have big plans for Nick Herbig this year.”
What might those big plans entail? They didn’t give him a $100 million contract — 47 percent more per season than Alex Highsmith is currently getting — to have him sit on the bench.
Herbig has only played 60 percent or more of the team’s defensive snaps in 12 of his 45 career regular season games. That just about lines up perfectly with the number of games that either Highsmith or T.J. Watt have missed with injuries. Moving forward, his usage won’t be contingent on an injury to the guys ahead of him.
“We know one thing about Patrick Graham. He likes to get creative on third downs when it’s 3rd-and-long,” Ray Fittipaldo said. “That’s when he likes to pull out his bag of tricks. So you could see three outside linebackers in the game.”
When all three were healthy in 2025, Watt played roughly 41.6 percent of the snaps, Highsmith 36.5 percent and Herbig 21.8 percent.
Over the last two seasons alone, the trio of Watt, Highsmith and Herbig have missed a combined 19 regular season games with various injuries. They had just eight games where all were fully healthy in 2025.
In addition to special three-OLB packages, perhaps we see a more balanced share of the snaps to keep all three as healthy as possible.
What “big plans” ultimately means will reveal itself soon enough, but all signs point to Herbig moving well beyond a rotational role in 2026.
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