While George Pickens is the most recent Pittsburgh Steelers wide receiver to be in the news for the wrong reasons, he’s certainly not the first. If the Steelers have any sort of streak going, it’s one of wide receivers making media headlines. Appearing on NFL Live Thursday, ESPN’s Ryan Clark pointed out the concerning trend happening under Mike Tomlin.
“The other piece of it for me is the state of that room, the wide receiver room,” Clark said on the show. “From Antonio Brown to JuJu [Smith-Schuster] to Chase Claypool to Diontae [Johnson], and now to George Pickens. There’s been a cancer in that room. I don’t know how it started. I don’t know if it’s Coach Tomlin’s ability or willingness to let you be authentically you. But something needs to change because what’s happened generation to generation, era to era, year to year in that room has been absolutely unacceptable.”
Clark’s list of names, one that didn’t include WR Martavis Bryant and his repeated NFL suspensions, have some common threads. Players who often didn’t have a filter and said exactly what they were thinking, often getting themselves in trouble over it, at least from a media circle.
The degree of each player is different, and it’d be unfair to label them all as “cancers.” Brown was a tireless worker but his spot on the team became untenable after calling out the organization multiple times. Smith-Schuster was never regarded as a bad guy but a young player who liked to have fun. Clark might be the first to call him a “cancer.” Claypool’s antics, though, wore thin and his production didn’t justify it. Johnson doesn’t seem like a cancer either but certainly someone consistently inserting himself into media headlines for on and off-the-field reasons. Pickens is the latest addition to that batch.
While Tomlin was critical of Pickens for how he’s handled the media, writing the book on saying the worst thing at the worst time, he’s also defended him throughout this season. Even during Wednesday’s rare post-practice media session, Tomlin’s message was in many ways supportive. While it may seem like coddling, and it could prove to be the wrong course of action, it’s clear Tomlin feels a responsibility to help Pickens mature. And for someone to be in his corner at a time when fans and media, understandably, are critical of him.
The question becomes – can Tomlin do it? He did keep Brown’s saga under wraps for seemingly longer than any other head coach could have. But Claypool never got the message, and the team shipped him to Chicago where the Bears never got through to him either. For Clark, he sees this as a critical point not just for Pickens but also Tomlin’s ability to handle the locker room.
“This is a team that now talks more after they lose than when they win,” Clark said. “And when you lose is when you should keep your mouth shut and get to work. There is no excuse for lack of effort.”
Though Tomlin has been a defensive coach for most of his career, he was a wide receiver in high school and college. And by all accounts, for the level he at which he played, a pretty good one. It’s logical Tomlin thinks he can “make it work” with the Type-A personalities at the position because he knows how they think. That they want the ball, that they get frustrated when they can’t make plays, that there’s a level of ego involved with many of the great ones (and even the not-so-great ones).
While Pickens has to be open to receiving the help, Tomlin is betting his reputation on being able to develop him as a person and a player.
