The Steelers are now back at the UPMC Rooney Sports Complex, facing down a long regular season that looks a lot more promising given how things have gone leading up to it. Finishing just above .500 last year, they anticipate being able to compete with any team in the league this season with second-year QB Kenny Pickett leading the way.
They’ve done a great deal to address what they identified as their shortcomings during the offseason, which included addressing the offensive and defensive lines as well as the secondary and the inside linebacker room, which is nearly entirely different from last year. The results have been positive so far.
Even well into the regular season and beyond, there are going to be plenty of questions that need answered. When will the core rookies get to play, or even start? Is the depth sufficient where they upgraded? Can they stand toe-to-toe with the Bengals and the other top teams in the league? We’ll try to frame the conversation in relevant ways as long as you stick with us throughout the season, as we have for many years.
Question: How should the Steelers handle the “George Pickens situation”?
Truth be told, I was already planning on writing something about second-year WR George Pickens in the coming days due to his low-football-IQ failings on the field. That was my concern. He is failing to make plays or to get credit for plays simply because he is not showing enough situational awareness.
In this last game, he robbed himself of a touchdown simply because he didn’t pay enough attention to where he was on the field and did not keep his second foot in-bounds. By all appearances, it certainly seems as though he should have. Previously, on another ball that he caught out of bounds, it was originally ruled a catch, but he should have hustled back to the line of scrimmage to reduce the chances of the play being challenged and overturned—which is exactly what happened.
But yet we keep being reminded of pre-draft concerns about his maturity. Rather than burying that narrative, he is fueling it. Whether it’s making questionably inflammatory comments about the opponent, showing poor body language on the field, or acting up on social media, the red flags are flying as much as the yellow ones were on Thursday night.
Pickens, for example, seemed to take no pleasure in WR Diontae Johnson’s go-ahead touchdown, his first since Pickens entered the league, sitting aside to himself on the bench and appearing to be upset or frustrated. He caught two passes in the game for minus-one yard, but it’s his own fault that he didn’t have a touchdown.
Yesterday, according to people who care about players’ social media activities, Pickens apparently scrubbed his Instagram page and possibly unfollowed some teammates and other Steelers accounts that he had previously been following. Unfortunately, we’re supposed to care about such things today in sports reporting.
So the question is, if Pickens is really acting out and struggling to be a team player and getting frustrated about his usage, his production, or the team in general, what do the Steelers do about it? I imagine head coach Mike Tomlin is going to have a talk with him, if he hasn’t already, but there is a pattern of behavior now. Chukwuma Okorafor says he was benched in Thursday’s game for behavioral/disciplinary reasons. What about Pickens?
