It doesn’t seem like all that long ago that former Pittsburgh Steelers WR JuJu Smith-Schuster was seen as the next rising star in the city’s sports hero constellation. After a standout rookie season in 2017, he quickly ascended to Pro Bowl levels but has since come back down to Earth.
While he has still contributed in significant ways frequently in the years since, at no point during that time has he ever been taken seriously as a true No. 1 receiver. Indeed, he’s become more of a role player even in the awful offense of the New England Patriots, who are coming to town on Thursday.
It’s quite interesting that the Steelers’ two Pro Bowl Day-Two draft picks from 2017 make their Pittsburgh returns in the same week. This past Sunday, 2017 third-round RB James Conner led his Arizona Cardinals to victory over the team that drafted him with a 105-yard, two-touchdown performance.
Up to that game, Conner was not having his best season. He missed significant time due to injury, but even then, he had not scored a touchdown in several weeks and was months removed from his last 100-yard game.
We can only hope that Smith-Schuster, who was estimated as limited in Monday’s simulated practice report, doesn’t find similar rejuvenating forces making his “triumphant” return to the place where he first made his name—and built his “brand”, as it were—in the NFL. That might be asking too much, but stranger things have happened.
As has been the case for most of his career, Smith-Schuster has dealt with injuries this year, missing two games during the middle of the season, but he’s been playing starter snaps most recently, hitting 90-plus percent in two of the past three games. He has four catches on eight targets for 30 yards to show for those efforts.
In fact, on the season, he has just 25 receptions on 41 targets for 170 yards with one touchdown, which came more than a month ago in a blowout loss to the Miami Dolphins. That was his only catch that day and his first game back from injury. The following week, he had a season-high six catches for 51 yards—which tells you all you need to know about the season he’s having.
Of course, he is stuck playing in arguably the worst non-injury-related quarterback situation in the league, with Bill Belichick’s team drowning in the misery of bouncing between Mac Jones and Bailey Zappe. It’s so bad that head coach Mike Tomlin had to try to talk up the difficulty of facing this offense by pointing to the uncertainty of who they will play.
The Patriots’ most productive receiver by yardage this season, rookie sixth-round pick Demario Douglas, missed Sunday’s game with a shoulder injury and could miss Thursday’s game as well. They already lost their top receiver, Kendrick Bourne, to a torn ACL.
Smith-Schuster, then, should see plenty of playing time in his homecoming, like Conner just days ago, in his first game in Pittsburgh since leaving the Steelers in free agency. Let’s hope he doesn’t have nearly the success, or at least if he does, that it doesn’t contribute to the Patriots finding the end zone. Former Pro Bowlers on two-win teams embarrassing the Steelers on their own field is getting old really quickly.
