Kaleb Johnson – Running Back, Pittsburgh Steelers: Career, Stats, and What Comes Next
Kaleb Johnson rushed for 21 touchdowns and 1,537 yards at Iowa in 2024, set single-season school records for touchdowns and total points, and then carried the ball 28 times for 69 yards across his entire first NFL season. That contrast is the story. Not a failure – but not the arrival everyone expected either.
Hamilton, Ohio, a Billboard, and a Grandfather Who Said No to Football
Johnson was born August 14, 2003, in Cincinnati and grew up in Hamilton, Ohio – the kind of town where a kid can walk past a football billboard and point and say “I want to do that,” which is exactly what Johnson did. His grandfather Jeffrey Strader, who helped raise him, told him he could play as long as school came first. That deal held throughout his career. Johnson was an AP Scholar and Honor Roll student at Hamilton High. He was also a team captain his junior and senior years and lettered in basketball and track.
The part of his story that doesn’t get enough attention: when Johnson was around 14, his grandmother Charlene Strader died. She had told Jeffrey in her final days to make sure Kaleb was taken care of. Jeffrey’s response was to pull Johnson out of organized sports entirely for a stretch – not as punishment, but to keep him anchored during a period when a lot of kids lose the thread. Johnson has said the grief and the refocus that followed it is one of the real turning points in who he became. “I really wanted to do it for her,” he said in 2024. “Because I knew she would be proud of me.”
He was baptized in May 2025, and he called it one of the most meaningful moments of his life. Faith, family, and football – in roughly that order, if you take his own words seriously.
High School Numbers That Made Scouts Shrug
At Hamilton High, Johnson ran for 1,004 yards and 15 touchdowns as a senior. Over four prep seasons he totaled more than 3,200 rushing yards. The production was real, but the competition level held his rating down. He came out as a three-star recruit – 36th-ranked running back nationally in the class of 2022. He had offers from Michigan, Michigan State, Cincinnati, Kentucky, Pitt, and others, but wasn’t a blue-chip name.
He committed first to California. Then flipped to Iowa. In retrospect that decision ended up defining everything – because Iowa’s run-heavy scheme gave him the volume to show what he could do, and he had the patience and vision to make the most of it.
Iowa: Three Seasons, One Record-Breaking Year, and a Sophomore Stumble That Gets Glossed Over
As a freshman in 2022, Johnson set a single-season rushing record for Iowa freshmen with 779 yards. That number got attention. The expectations entering his sophomore year were legitimately high – and he didn’t meet them. Injury cost him three games, and in the games he did play after returning he rarely exceeded 60 yards. It was the kind of season that tests whether a player has the makeup to come back. He did.
The 2024 season was something different. Johnson started all 11 games he was healthy for, ran 240 times for 1,537 yards (6.4 yards per carry), scored 21 rushing touchdowns and 23 total touchdowns, and added 22 receptions for 188 yards and two more scores. He led the Big Ten in rushing touchdowns, ranked fourth in the entire FBS in rushing yards, and his 23 total touchdowns and 138 points scored were both single-season records at Iowa. He was the only Hawkeye ever to score in all 12 regular season games.
Those numbers get more impressive with context. Iowa is not a program that generates individual offensive stars. The offensive scheme is conservative and run-heavy, the offensive line gets the credit for most run production, and the passing game is historically limited. Johnson accounted for over 40 percent of Iowa’s entire offense in 2024 – a figure Boise State’s Ashton Jenty is the only FBS player who topped. He did it against Big Ten defenses, not Sun Belt competition.
Some individual game performances worth noting: 206 rushing yards and three touchdowns at Minnesota on 21 carries (one of only five Hawkeyes ever to post two 200-yard games in a career). A 35-carry, 164-yard performance at Maryland – 35 carries is the most in a single game for Iowa since 2015. Against Nebraska, his 72-yard reception was Iowa’s longest pass play of the season. He went into the fourth quarter stronger than he started, averaging 8.2 yards per carry in Q4 in 2024. Zero fumbles on 240 carries.
NBC analyst Todd Blackledge described him as “the total package” – “speed, power, patience, vision and toughness.” That’s not a throwaway quote. Blackledge has watched a lot of running backs.
After the Nebraska game, Johnson declared for the 2025 NFL Draft. He was named first-team All-American, Big Ten Running Back of the Year, and was a finalist for the Doak Walker Award.
The Draft Slide Nobody Fully Explained – But Some Sources Did
Going into the 2025 draft cycle, several analysts had Johnson projected in the late first round or early second. He measured 6-foot-1, 224 pounds at the combine and ran a 4.57 40-yard dash – not blazing, but solid for a back his size. He also put up 28 carries of 15-plus yards in 2024, third-most in the FBS, and 21 runs of 20-plus yards, which ranked second. The production was undeniable.
He fell to pick 83. Third round.
According to reporting from Walter Football, teams had two primary concerns. The first was physicality – Johnson is a big back who runs with patience and finesse, but he doesn’t run angry. He doesn’t punish tacklers or consistently create yards after contact against NFL-caliber defenders the way some teams want from a feature back. The second concern was off-field: maturity questions that were vague in the reporting but consistent across multiple team sources. Neither concern was decisive on its own, but together they pushed him down boards.
There’s something a little hard to square about this. A back with zero fumbles on 240 carries, a 4.0 GPA, AP Scholar honors, and baptism at 21 years old raised maturity flags with enough NFL teams to cost him at least a round of draft value. Whatever those concerns were specifically, they weren’t in the public record. Pittsburgh took him anyway.
What He Actually Does on a Football Field
The scouting report on Johnson isn’t complicated, but it is specific. His best trait is vision combined with patience at the line of scrimmage – he can press a gap, let blocks develop, and then cut decisively without hesitating. In a zone-blocking scheme, that’s exactly what you need. Steelers offensive coordinator Arthur Smith ran zone concepts in Atlanta before coming to Pittsburgh, and Johnson was identified by Pro Football Focus as the best scheme fit of any running back in the 2025 draft class for his new team.
He finds cutback lanes that most backs his size can’t see. His contact balance is legitimately good – he absorbs hits, maintains his footing, and often falls forward for extra yards rather than stopping on contact. His stiff arm is effective. He runs his feet on contact and consistently gains hidden yardage by leaning into the pile. None of that shows up in a box score.
The legitimate weaknesses: his pass protection in college was limited by Iowa’s scheme, which didn’t ask him to pick up blitzes often. NFL defensive coordinators will test that immediately. His receiving usage was also modest given Iowa’s passing offense, so his ability to be a genuine three-down back in the NFL was unproven entering the draft. He’s a volume runner who produces best with a heavy workload – which means a team has to commit to him to get the most out of him, and Pittsburgh wasn’t fully ready to do that in 2025.
The Kickoff, the Benching, and a Rookie Year That Didn’t Go as Planned
Week 2, 2025 regular season. Pittsburgh at Seattle. Johnson lined up for a kickoff return, let the ball bounce, and the Seahawks recovered it for a touchdown. The Steelers lost the game. Mike Tomlin pulled Johnson from kick return duties immediately, and within a week he was largely off the field. He played 51 offensive snaps all season. Carried the ball 28 times for 69 yards – a 2.5 yards per carry average that doesn’t reflect well on him or on how he was used.
By season’s end he was behind Jaylen Warren and newly signed Rico Dowdle on the depth chart. The Steelers also lost Kenneth Gainwell (who had taken over return duties) in the offseason, added Travis Homer for special teams, and signed Dowdle in free agency – which tells you something about how confident the organization was in Johnson heading into Year 2.
Steelers Depot’s post-season review was blunt: Johnson was the weak link in Pittsburgh’s 2025 draft class, the highest-drafted player to contribute the least. That’s a fair read of the numbers. It’s also one season, 51 snaps, and a coaching staff change.
New head coach Mike McCarthy, who replaced Tomlin after the 2025 season, told reporters in the spring that “everybody has a clean slate and let’s get to work” when asked about Johnson. That’s the kind of comment coaches give when they’re not closing the door but aren’t making promises either. Johnson is 22 years old. His second NFL season hasn’t been played yet.
Career Stats at a Glance
At Iowa across three seasons, Johnson carried the ball 508 times for 2,779 yards and 30 rushing touchdowns. He caught 29 passes for 240 yards and two more scores. His 2024 season alone – 240 carries, 1,537 yards, 21 touchdowns – ranks third all-time in single-season rushing yards at Iowa and first in touchdowns and total points.
In the NFL through the 2025 season: 10 games played, 28 carries, 69 yards, zero touchdowns, 2.5 yards per carry. No catches recorded. His NFL numbers are, charitably, a placeholder.
The college résumé is legitimate. A 17th player in Iowa history to rush for 2,000 career yards. Fifth to record two 200-yard games. Twelfth all-time in 100-yard rushing games at the school with 12. Those are program records, not just conference records, at one of the more historically consistent programs in the Big Ten.
What 2026 Actually Looks Like
The realistic picture: Johnson enters 2026 as the third running back on Pittsburgh’s depth chart, behind Jaylen Warren and Rico Dowdle. The Steelers did not draft a running back in the 2026 draft (they took a fullback in the fifth round – Riley Nowakowski from Indiana), which keeps the door open without swinging it wide.
For Johnson to matter in 2026, he needs Warren or Dowdle to miss time, or he needs to outperform both in training camp to a degree that changes the coaching staff’s calculus. Neither is impossible. Warren is 27 and has had injury history. Dowdle is coming off his first full season as a feature back. Johnson is younger than both and physically more imposing than either.
From a fantasy football perspective, his dynasty value is as a buy-low speculative pick – cheap, young, with college production that justifies the original third-round investment. His redraft value in 2026 is minimal unless something changes at the top of the depth chart. FantasyPros listed him entering 2026 as sitting behind both Warren and Dowdle with an “extremely underwhelming rookie campaign” on record.
The gap between what Johnson did at Iowa and what he’s done in the NFL is real. It’s also not unusual for running backs. Saquon Barkley had 352 yards in his rookie year across limited usage before becoming one of the better backs in the league. That comparison flatters Johnson. But the underlying point – that one rough season doesn’t define a running back’s career at 22 – is sound.
He’s got the tools. He’s got the résumé. He doesn’t yet have the NFL proof. Those are three separate things, and right now only two of them apply.
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