There has been a lot of talk in recent weeks about how defenses committing extra resources to cover Pittsburgh Steelers WR George Pickens has opened things up for other parts of the offense. There is some truth to that, as best illustrated in by the season-high 166 rushing yards they racked up as a team the last time out.
But the Steelers didn’t draft Pickens to be a high-pedigreed decoy. Teams have been trying to take him away and have been more successful in doing so at some times than others, they know their offense would function best if he’s making plays.
“We can’t let him just be minimized completely”, offensive coordinator Matt Canada told reporters on Thursday, via transcript provided by the team’s media relations department. “Ultimately all we care about is winning, but we certainly want to maximize all our guys’ potential, so there’s opportunities to do those things”.
And how best to go about doing that? Canada has a simple idea: make defenses pay. If they’re going to sell out to take Pickens away, the rest of the offense has to capitalize on the opportunities that provides elsewhere.
“There’s also opportunities to make sure if they’re putting two guys on and we’re making them pay enough”, he said, “all those drives are scoring drives. At some point then they shouldn’t be able to do that. Our run game increases, [WR Diontae Johnson] increases, other guys increase to where they can’t do that”.
Many, many teams deploy defensive strategy for which the focus is minimizing an opponent’s most talented skill-position player. The Steelers do this every year against certain opponents, and sometimes that allows other players to make more plays. But the trade-off is that the collective of those plays, in theory, is less harmful than the total body of work an opponent’s best player might have had if defended traditionally.
And so it says a lot that teams more and more are focusing more on Pickens, particularly in more recent weeks. Prior to the last two outings, he had three 100-yard games in a five-game span. He caught 22 passes during that time for 464 yards and two touchdowns.
Notably, he had one of his best games in Week Six, the first game after the bye week, and the first game with Johnson back. He was a back-shoulder machine in that one, with the Los Angeles Rams having little in the way of an answer for it.
While there are plays that have been missed since then, the Jacksonville Jaguars and Tennessee Titans committed even greater efforts to reducing Pickens’ ability to take over the game. And yet in each one he still managed to break out.
Against the Jaguars, he had just one catch, but it was for a 22-yard touchdown on which he squeezed through a pair of defenders to find the end zone. Last week against the Titans, he had an opportunity for what should have been a 12-yard touchdown, only he got a little sloppy and was unable to keep his second foot inbounds. So even when teams are trying to bottle him up, he’s still finding his spots to strike.
