With the Pittsburgh Steelers on a break before heading to Latrobe for training camp, we’re going to take a look at our expectations for this upcoming season and offer some over/under statistics to weigh in on. The offense wasn’t overly prolific last year, but the defense did put up some big numbers.
That can change in 2023 now that the offense is beginning to mature around second-year quarterback Kenny Pickett, though, and if the Steelers can keep T.J. Watt healthy all year, that will only help everybody be more productive—perhaps especially the defensive backs. So each day we’ll project one stat line, whether for a player or a unit, and share our thoughts before asking you to weigh in on whether you think they will hit the over or the under.
It is your job to project whether or not the over or under will be hit. At the end of the series, we will be tallying up the answers for each installment to create a collective pre-training camp snapshot of where you stand heading into the 2023 season.
Stat Line: 1,000 receiving yards for Diontae Johnson
The Steelers have not had many prolific seasons over the past half a decade in terms of wide receiver production. Indeed, since both Antonio Brown and JuJu Smith-Schuster hit the mark in 2018, only one player in one season has reached 1,000 receiving yards.
That was Diontae Johnson in 2021, in Ben Roethlisberger’s final season. He gained 1,161 receiving yards that year on 107 receptions with eight touchdowns. Last year, he only got to 882 receiving yards on 86 receptions, and he didn’t even find the end zone.
But considering the fact that he came within 118 yards of 1,000 with the upheaval at the quarterback position, it’s not unreasonable to think that he can get back there in 2023. He’s working on building his rapport with second-year quarterback Kenny Pickett, with whom he got in virtually no work before they were on the field together in the fourth week of the regular season.
As long as he gets his targets, and they convert on more of them this year with better rapport, there’s no reason that he can’t hit 1,000 receiving yards. If you average out the past two seasons, it comes out to 1,021 yards, so it’s not like he’s been far off. And he will still be a high-volume target.
But there are still other mouths to feed, and one can reasonably deduce that the other skill positions will be getting more targets this year, or a higher percentage of targets. On top of that, we can reasonably expect that they will continue the trend of the second half of last season of running the football more. Combine that with the emergence of George Pickens, and it would hardly be surprising if Johnson falls short of 1,000 yards.
So what do you think? Taking these factors and others into consideration, are you taking the over or under on 1,000 yards for Steelers wide receiver Diontae Johnson? Answer below and at the end of the series we’ll tally all your answers together to see where you stand before we get to training camp.
