WR George Pickens has made numerous plays for the Pittsburgh Steelers over the past two games during WR Diontae Johnson’s absence. While he is known for his spectacular catches, the play that sticks out in my memory the most is uh…well, just see for yourself and you’ll probably know why.
It looks like his Spidey senses tingled and he sprang into action. As his quarterback was running on a scramble, he turned his eyes back and looked for someone to block. And so he launched his body backward, looking like Spider Man trying to cling to the side of a building. QB Kenny Pickett didn’t quite get to see it live, but he said he saw it not long after the game.
“Someone showed me after the game when we were getting on the plane. George is right behind me. He was like, ‘Yeah, I was trying to block’”, he told Jordan Palmer and Kyle Allen on The QB Room podcast. “I was like, ‘Dude, I appreciate the effort’. I think he saw him last second, he jumped back”.
As I look back on the block now, especially from the All-22 camera, I do find myself wondering more if it wasn’t the tackler, CB Nate Hobbs, who was his actual target, trying to back his shoulder into the defensive back. Either way, he sprung his body backward and Spidey-flipped into former teammate Robert Spillane instead. But Pickett gets it and appreciates it.
“He knows whenever those guys are behind me, if they reverse field, I always try and throw a block, so I know he was trying to return the favor”, he said, “but I appreciate the effort from my boy, and I’ll return the favor if I can ever get out ahead of him. He’s a lot faster than me, I’d have to run pretty fast”.
You can see what Pickett is referring to on his reverse-field run by RB Najee Harris a week earlier. He puts in the effort when the opportunity allows for it, which truthfully isn’t something that can be said for every starting quarterback.
It’s all just a testament to the willingness of the players on this team to throw their bodies around for each other, in the most literal sense possible in this case. It goes without saying that Pickens’ block attempt was rather unconventional, but the effort itself was awesome.
Less awesome is the fact that his illegal shift penalty on the play negated the long scramble in the first place, so not only did the block go for naught, so did the run for which he threw the block in the first place. With that being said, the young wide receiver had a nice game for himself, with four catches for 75 yards and a 127-yard game the week before.
