The first game of the regular season for the Pittsburgh Steelers is only a little more than a week away. It will mark the end of the speculation period and the beginning of the answers phase. We already know all the premises to look for once things do get underway, but who isn’t ready to see all the analysis turn into data?
One storyline to follow this year is the maturation of second-year WR George Pickens and how he continues to flesh out his game. But it’s also a pivotal year for him to prove that his greatest attribute is not a fluke—his ability to win the contested pass.
Everybody seems to be convinced that he can and will, not that he has done anything this year to suggest otherwise. Former Steelers CB Joe Haden is on board. “It looks crazy from the outside looking in, just being a fan”, he told DL Cameron Heyward on his Not Just Football podcast.
“If it’s one-on-one outside, look off the safety and throw it over there. Dude is showing that it’s not a 50/50 ball. It’s a 90/10 ball”, he said. “90 percent he’s gonna catch it, 3 percent they might catch it, 7 percent incomplete. He’s Mossing dudes very consistently. You just don’t do that. It’s not a fluke. It doesn’t look like a fluke. He’s getting it done”.
Haden never got to cover Pickens because his final season with the Steelers was in 2021, ultimately retiring last offseason. But he knows a thing or two about covering some of the toughest assignments in the game like Antonio Brown and Diontae Johnson.
But neither of them possesses Pickens’ exceedingly rare ability to win at the catch point with an extraordinarily high frequency. This element of his game has been compared to the likes of DeAndre Hopkins, including by himself, as well as Larry Fitzgerald—quite impressive company.
The Georgia product caught a remarkable 68 percent of the catchable passes thrown in his direction that were deemed contested, the highest rate in the NFL. The only two players who were comparable in terms of success rate and volume were Mike Evans and Terry McLaurin.
So that’s not quite 90/10, but you get the idea. If you’re going to throw a ball up to anybody in the NFL, you might just want it to be Pickens. After all, nobody came down with a higher percentage of such passes last season. He also had the third-most contested catches overall.
D.K. Metcalf had 24 to his 19, but on 47 targets rather than 28. Justin Jefferson only had three more contested catches on 12 more targets. Their numbers were more the product of the volume of targets that they receive.
The question is, what kind of volume will Pickens see this season? Certainly more than last year, but will he truly emerge as the go-to guy in an offense that also includes Diontae Johnson and Pat Freiermuth as players who could easily see 100-plus targets themselves? Can they sustain three 100-target players?
