The older you get, the more you experience, the more knowledge you accumulate, the more you become aware of just how much you do not know.
This is a generally universal truth, and it makes sense. Put simply, you don’t know what you don’t know. It’s not quite ‘ignorance is bliss’, but it can be an undue degree of self-assuredness. Some young Pittsburgh Steelers have been getting their education in this vein recently.
Third-year RB Najee Harris recently acknowledged that he learned there were more things that he needed to work on in his game than he realized. Likewise, rooming with veteran Allen Robinson II has been an eye opener for second-year WR George Pickens, whom he called “a guy that just knows everything”.
Head coach Mike Tomlin stuck the two in a room together during their stay at Saint Vincent College in Latrobe for training camp. He wanted Pickens to benefit from the wisdom of the sage veteran wide receiver who was once in his shoes. And that’s exactly what happened. Lessons learned.
“He was telling me certain depths on routes, really just savvy things that I didn’t even know”, he told Miss Matthews for the team’s website about what he learned. “Sometimes when you play football you think you know everything, but he was telling me stuff that I didn’t know, for sure”.
I admit, it’s been some years since I even came close to thinking I knew everything about anything, or anywhere close to it for that matter. But it’s understandable to a certain degree when you are talking about young athletes who are graduating from one level of competition to the highest.
Many, many players can get by with a lower level of effort at the college level than they can in the NFL, whether we’re talking about physical or intellectual or even emotional investment in the game. There are much fewer shortcuts, so to speak, when virtually everybody is as good as you are, or at least in the conversation.
Pickens has elite talent, but he needs to channel it effectively to reach his true potential. I think his experience learning from Robinson on and off the field during the past several months will be highly beneficial in that regard.
Another veteran wide receiver, Dointae Johnson, recently talked about Robinson as though he were an extra coordinator out on the field. He said that when they came to the sideline he would be telling them, telling coaches, what plays they could effectively run against the defenses they had been seeing.
It’s that level of knowledge of the game that can help Pickens live up to his own image of himself as the best wide receiver in the world. Partly just because there’s some very stiff competition for that title in this golden age of wide receivers.
