Mileage may vary from person to person just how often they are interested in hearing every conversation about the Pittsburgh Steelers in the national media being engulfed by the matter of second-year quarterback Kenny Pickett. But let’s be honest: there isn’t a bigger storyline in Pittsburgh. His future is the team’s future.
And reports on that front have been consistently glowing, but I think what has interested me most this offseason have been the little nuggets from various sources pointing to how much time Pickett seems to spend scouting himself—through the eyes of others.
Veteran cornerback Levi Wallace is the latest defender to talk about how Pickett has come up to him wanting to pick his brain. He wants to know what the cornerback sees from him and what he can do to make what he sees less obvious.
“We talk a lot of trash, but we also build each other up. He asks me, ‘What do [you] see?’, what is he doing that makes him so predictable?”, he recently said on NFL Network’s Good Morning Football. “Because he wants to get rid of all bad habits. He wants to be the best quarterback in the league. He wants to be the best competitor. He never wants to lose”.
Cornerback Patrick Peterson also talked about the same thing earlier this offseason, and I think it goes without saying that Pickett’s had the same conversations with All-Pro safety Minkah Fitzpatrick. The two spend a lot of time together studying film. He even joked he wanted to slap the team’s helmet cam on the safety to see how he sees the offense.
Self-scouting is one of the most important, and perhaps most overlooked, elements of getting better. It doesn’t matter how good you are if your opponent knows what you’re going to do. Eventually you’re going to lose enough of those battles if there’s nothing to surprise.
Everybody has their tells if you know how to find them. On the other side of the ball, All-Pro outside linebacker T.J. Watt has become a master of picking them up, influenced in part by the advice of his older brother, J.J., about how to pick them up.
Pickett is spending time in his first full offseason as a professional working on this part of his game, trying to figure out what he does to tip off what’s coming, and then working to eliminate that. The simplest way to do that is to create tendency breakers, showing multiple results from the same look or tell. If a tell can’t consistently predict what’s coming, then it’s not a tell anymore.
All of this might sound obvious, but it’s a very important thing to understand, and it’s very encouraging to keep hearing these little details about how Pickett is devoting time to seemingly every single aspect of the position to try to improve. His work ethic really does seem to be relentless at times.
