Going into Week 12 last season, the Pittsburgh Steelers stood at a mere 3-7. The season was looking pretty bleak.
But since then, just about everything has gone right. They finished out the season winning six of their last seven games, and although they didn’t make the playoffs, they carried a lot of momentum into the offseason. GM Omar Kahn has seemingly capitalized on this momentum, bringing in some solid additions both young and old. And finally, this year’s preseason went to perfection, as the team finished a sterling 3-0 and saw most of their young players perform well.
One of those young performers is WR George Pickens, who recently talked about how he plans to carry over this momentum to the regular season, in an interview on Steelers.com.
“Composure from all of the guys for me – for all of the guys that do their part and for me to make those plays, try to carry it over. Everybody’s just going to be composed and be prolific.” Pickens said. “It’s my expectation for sure, I don’t want to give a pony a whole bunch of land and put him in a cage. I don’t want to make a guy feel like we gotta do anything more than we have to do. Last year it was really the same thing. It’s always gonna be football. I just feel like we just gotta come out there and play.”
As Pickens moves into year two, he’s going to be handed quite a bit of responsibility for a second-year receiver, especially one who wasn’t even a first-round pick. Even the biggest believers in Kenny Pickett are likely to admit that he’s not ready to carry an offense on his own right now and that he’s going to need some solid complementary weapons this early in his development.
The Steelers seemingly have a good stable of pieces around Pickett, none of whom have a higher ceiling than Pickens. But as he said, Pickens doesn’t want anyone, including himself, thinking they have to do too much for this team to win. Despite his knack for the spectacular, he’s talked a lot this offseason about making the routine play routinely, a mantra of Mike Tomlin’s.
And that will have to be the mantra of the 2023 Steelers if they want to win games. Are they going to play in exciting shootouts that will win fantasy weeks for owners? No, almost certainly not. But what they may lack in high-flying football, they more than makeup for in winning football players. In the NFL, that’s all that matters.
