Now that the Pittsburgh Steelers’ 2023 season is getting underway after the team finished above .500 but failing to make the postseason last year, we turn our attention to the next chapter of Steelers football and everything that entails. One thing that it means is that some stock evaluations are going to start taking on more specific contexts as we get into the season, reflecting more immediate plusses and minus rather than trends over long periods. The nature of the evaluation, whether short-term or long-term, will be noted in the reasoning section below.
Player: WR Allen Robinson II
Stock Value: Down
Reasoning: The veteran wide receiver seemingly continues to lose ground in terms of his role in the passing game with the return of Diontae Johnson. Even Calvin Austin III got more work this past week. The most telling statistic: for the first time in his entire career, he failed to catch a pass in a game for which he dressed.
117.
That is how many games in which veteran WR Allen Robinson II has played since his rookie season in 2014. Never before until this past Sunday had he played in a game and failed to record even a single reception.
To have caught at least one pass in more than 100 consecutive games, to be sure, is no easy task. It has only been done a somewhat relatively small number of times in NFL history, 63 to be exact, and Robinson’s streak stopped at the 44th-longest ever.
Hines Ward, by the way, still owns the fifth-longest streak ever at 186, and Antonio Brown’s 144 ranks 17th. Heath Miller and Plaxico Burress are two other Steelers who recorded a streak of 100-plus games at least partly in Pittsburgh.
Robinson, of course, is in his first season with the Steelers after they acquired him via trade. At the time, many perceived them as being the clear winners of the deal, yet so far it doesn’t seem to me they are getting their money’s worth.
The veteran wide receiver has all of 18 receptions thus far for 144 yards, averaging under two yards after the catch per reception. His receptions only result in a successful play for the offense 42.9 percent of the time.
Pittsburgh did not acquire him with the expectation that he would put up Pro Bowl numbers. They were attracted by a lot of his intangible qualities as his leadership and maturity, which they hoped he could pass on to younger players like George Pickens.
But at the end of the day, he’s still a wide receiver in the National Football League, and he’s still spending a lot of time on the field without offering a lot of production. He ranks in the bottom five in the league among wide receivers in yards per route run at just 0.69. And only three out of 55 players who have run as many routes as he has have fewer receiving yards.
