It hasn’t been a secret that the Pittsburgh Steelers are looking to upgrade their wide receiver room. They were heavily linked to Brandon Aiyuk, Davante Adams, Cooper Kupp, and others dating back to before the season started. That has to be nerve wracking for the current receivers on the roster who stand the most to lose if a WR2 is brought in, especially when they were producing so little as a group through the first several games of the season.
After back-to-back weeks of Russell Wilson starting, the wide receiver room suddenly looks much more competent. They could of course still use an upgrade, but it doesn’t look like the pressing issue it was just a few weeks ago.
Calvin Austin III was asked if tonight’s win was a statement for the wide receiver room that they don’t need to add more talent.
“I guess it could be a statement for the outside world,” Austin said in a video posted by Yardbarker’s Aaron Becker on X. “Since OTAs, since training camp, we’ve always – each individual receiver – we feel how we feel. We all competitors, we going to always bank on us regardless. We always knew what we were capable of inside our receiver room.”
The trade deadline is Nov. 5, which means there will be one more weekend of games while the Steelers are on their bye, and then the deadline will occur next Tuesday. With most of the major names on the WR market already traded or no longer available, the Steelers don’t really have a great option to improve. But that feels less important now with the emergence of guys like Austin and Van Jefferson.
Jefferson was targeted 5 times against the Giants and caught 4 of those for 62 yards. Austin was targeted 4 times and caught 3 of them for 54 yards and a touchdown. Wilson has been spreading the ball around way better and giving his receivers opportunities to make plays. While Justin Fields was starting, there was an awful lot of chatter about none of the receivers being open. I think we are starting to see that a good quarterback can throw the players open, and a more balanced offense can feed into itself.
There was a lot of talk about the Steelers being elite at drafting and developing wide receivers during Ben Roethlisberger’s tenure. The quarterback is obviously a large part of that equation, and having Wilson, a future Hall of Famer, is making that very clear.
By the next time we see the Steelers take the field, we will know whether they have added talent to the receiving room, but it’s starting to look less urgent than once believed.
