At the end of his meeting with reporters in the Pittsburgh locker room after the Steelers’ season concluded with a 28-14 loss to the Baltimore Ravens in an AFC first-round game on Saturday night, running back Najee Harris was asked if he would return to the NFL team in 2025.

“I haven’t given that much thought at all,” Harris said.

Steelers coach Mike Tomlin gave sort of the same answer when asked about Harris’ future with Pittsburgh at his end-of-season press conference on Tuesday.

“Naj has had an awesome four years here,” Tomlin said. “I understand that he is a free agent. Again, it’s at the very beginnings of that process in terms of us assessing what we’re capable of doing or what we desire to do. And I’d imagine it’s the same thing from a player’s perspective.

“But rest assured, we’ve had a good experience with him and obviously the ridiculous consistency in his performance in terms of producing four straight 1,000-yard seasons speaks for itself.”

After starting all 71 Pittsburgh games since the Steelers selected him from Alabama at No. 24 in the 2021 NFL Draft, Harris has reached the end of his rookie contract. He will become an unrestricted free agent able to sign with any NFL team on March 12 unless Pittsburgh signs him to a contract extension before then.

The Steelers already had an opportunity to secure Harris’ services for 2025. But during the offseason, they declined to exercise their option on Harris’ contract for a fifth season.

The fifth-year option would have guaranteed Harris $6.79 million for the 2025 season. That would have made him the eighth highest-paid of the running backs currently under contract for next season. In 2024, Pittsburgh paid Harris $2.439 million, which ranked 28th on the running-back compensation list.

Harris ran for 1,043 yards and six touchdowns on 263 carries and caught 36 passes for 283 yards in 17 regular-season games in 2024. He became the 14th player in NFL history to record 1,000 rushing yards in each of his first four seasons. Over the past four seasons, Harris, Saquon Barkley, Josh Jacobs and Joe Mixon are the only players who have produced at least 4,000 rushing yards and 1,000 receiving yards.

Pittsburgh’s rushing attack made steady improvement during Harris’ four seasons. During Harris’ rookie campaign, the Steelers ranked 29th among the 32 NFL teams in rushing yards. They rose to 16th in 2022, 13th in 2023 and 11th in 2024.

But the Pittsburgh rushing attack had an uneven season in 2024. Through the first 13 games, the Steelers’ number of rushing attempts ranged from 26 to 43 and Pittsburgh’s rushing yards ranged from 92 to 183.

The Steelers posted a 10-3 record in those games.

But in Pittsburgh’s five-game losing streak to end the season, the Steelers had 24 or fewer rushing attempts four times and produced their three lowest rushing outputs of the season – as well as their highest with 202 yards on 31 rushing attempts in a 29-10 loss to the Kansas City Chiefs on Dec. 25.

“We like to ride the wave that our running game provides,” Tomlin said, “and produce chunks in the play-passing game off of it and some of those things, control games and minimize the potential of negativity in terms of turning the ball over. At different times, we had really good traction and success in that area. It didn’t feel that way at the end. But we need to go back and comb through it in totality and understand why.”

In the postseason setback against Baltimore on Saturday, Pittsburgh ran for 29 yards on 11 carries, with Harris tying his career low with six rushing attempts.

“You want to do better, obviously,” Harris said. “We didn’t finish the season well. We started off good, but we just didn’t finish. You just got to go on the film and go in the offseason and figure out some stuff that you got to work on personally and just figure out how you can get better.”

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Mark Inabinett is a sports reporter for Alabama Media Group. Follow him on X at @AMarkG1.