When the footballs are flying in the air, it doesn’t seem to take much for Pittsburgh Steelers WR George Pickens to get himself trending. Not much for him, anyway. He makes the spectacular seem routine—because that’s what it seems to be for him. The second-year player offered up yet another highlight-reel catch in yesterday’s training camp practice that would be the best moment of most wide receivers’ careers.
The real question when it comes to Pickens is what he can do between the highlights and how consistently he can do it. During his rookie season last year, the answer was a bit underwhelming. Especially for somebody who has no problem letting it be known that he believes he is the best wide receiver in the world. But can he be as good as he thinks he is?
“Absolutely”, Mike Florio said on the PM Team program on 93.7 The Fan. “It’s just a question of trusting that he’s open when he doesn’t look open. He’s one of those guys who, even if you think that he’s not open, he’s gonna go get the ball if you put it in his direction”.
That’s something that the Steelers became increasingly more comfortable with as the season went along last year, even if he had his first major highlight pretty early on with that stunning one-handed snare against the Cleveland Browns that may have been the best catch anybody has made in years.
He referenced yet another spectacular catch that Pickens made during Tuesday’s training camp practice over rookie CB Joey Porter Jr. “He wasn’t ‘open’ in the classic sense, but he went and got the ball”, the Pro Football Talk head told his hosts.
“You need to start doing that when he’s one-on-one even if you think he’s covered”, he continued. “That’s how you draw two people toward him, and once two people are accounting for George Pickens on a regular basis, that’s when the rest of the offense opens up dramatically”.
While I tend to be reluctant when it comes to throwing it to players who aren’t open, it’s hard to argue with the numbers. Pickens had the most contested catches ever recorded by a rookie in a single season since Pro Football Focus began tracking that data.
He was also the only qualifying player in the NFL last season who caught more than two-thirds of his contested targets, which in itself is a remarkable feat.
But can he really keep doing that year after year? We’re talking about Calvin Johnson, Larry Fitzgerald, and DeAndre Hopkins territory here. Easily first-ballot Hall of Famers, some of the very greatest to ever play the game. There aren’t that many other players you’d want to consistently throw jump balls to, even if for him, they’re rarely ever “50/50”.
