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 Diontae Johnson
Stock Value: Up
Reasoning: Could it be anybody else this morning?
Look, we’ve got a long week and then some before the next game, so we’re going to be talking about a number of standout performances from last night’s game against the Tennessee Titans. But this day belongs to WR Diontae Johnson. It has to after he got the game-winning score on his first touchdown in nearly two years.
It’s been a long time coming, but Johnson had been steadily productive. In the season opener, he had three catches for 48 yards in little more than a half of football before going down with a hamstring injury. Upon his return, he has been gradually picking up the pace. He caught five passes for 79 yards his first game back, then eight for 85. Last night, he caught seven passes on nine targets for 90 yards—and the all-important touchdown.
All-important on so many levels. It was a huge monkey off of his back after setting an NFL record for the most catches in a season without a touchdown in 2022. He noted after the game that it had been 655 days since his last touchdown, though he did score twice on two-point conversions last year, so we could perhaps offer him two-thirds of a touchdown.
Johnson is going to frustrate you at times, to be sure. There were a few plays on Sunday in the Steelers’ loss to the Jacksonville Jaguars he would like to have back. He had a drop on the opening play of the game on a deep ball. Later in the first half, he and QB Kenny Pickett were not on the same page on what should have been a touchdown.
It was the second time of the year that he would have had a touchdown were it not for poor communication with Pickett—though the first one was more of just a bad throw/decision. The last one was Pickett expecting him to stop in a soft zone when he thought he should keep going.
But finally, he got into the end zone last night with a little over four minutes to play, scoring a touchdown on 1st and goal from the 3. It was a well-designed play taking advantage of a soft pick play out of a bunch, Johnson sitting behind Allen Robinson II at the snap. All he had to do was win to the outside after selling the inside break, and for his skill set, that was easy enough to do. For a man who hadn’t done it in 655 days, it sure looked easy.
