George Pickens’ talent isn’t hard to identify. He might not be the most nuanced technician among wide receivers, but the budding Pittsburgh Steelers star is building an impressive arsenal of jaw-dropping plays that should only become even more common going into Year Two. And he knows it.
“The stuff that I do, bro, I feel like I’m the best in the whole world”, he recently told Kevin Clark for The Ringer. And just so there’s no ambiguity, Clark asked him to clarify what it is at which he believes he’s the best. The best “receiver in the world”, he said.
The 22-year-old likened himself to a video game custom player. “As far as what you’d use to build a receiver, I’m the ideal guy”, he said. He also claims that the game’s player ratings are rigged, with a smile on his face.
Former Pittsburgh Steelers wide receiver Chase Claypool received grief last June for saying that he himself was a top-three wide receiver in the league, though later on in the year he said that he still has work to do to get there.
Yet I suspect Pickens won’t receive nearly the same sort of negative attention for his belief that he is as good or better than any other wide receiver in the game. Presumably because most would argue that his claim has more merit.
Still, he only had a fairly average rookie season, catching 52 passes for 801 yards and four touchdowns. That’s not even the sort of numbers Claypool put up during his rookie year, though he had a veteran in Ben Roethlisberger to work with. Pickens likes Kenny Pickett plenty, but both of them were rookies and hadn’t worked together a lot up to that point.
“I’m big, I’m fast, low 4.4 [speed]. Catch radius is crazy”, Pickens said about what he brings to the table. “So every time I get out on the field, I do kind of play angry because I should get the ball on every play if you just look at the size and the frame. If I was a coach, I’d just throw to him every time”.
He added that he knows that’s not how it works in the NFL—he’s certainly not ignorant—but that he channels his feelings through his physicality away from the ball. “I love getting the ball, and when I’m not getting the ball I play angry so the attention is back on me. I basically draw attention to myself”.
He was actually rather open about his desire for attention, even though he also talked about not being a celebrity. A former running back, it was an adjustment moving to wide receiver with the game plan shifting away from him—which is why he found things to do when the ball wasn’t coming to him.
He, of course, he plays angry when the ball is coming to him, too, especially when it’s in the air and there’s a defender around trying to contest it. That’s why he was the only qualifying player last season to come down with more than two-thirds of his contested targets last season—a good platform on which to build his case about being the best in the game.
