The Pittsburgh Steelers are not afraid to take a chance on a guy with some question marks, especially wide receivers. George Pickens is the latest example, and he has certainly proven to be a handful. Entering the final year of his contract, it’s unclear what the Steelers will do with him. But Ray Fitipaldo has a clear idea of what they need to do generally.
“Yeah, they need to break that habit”, he wrote in a recent chat when asked about the Steelers banking on their ability to maximize the talent of wide receivers with baggage. “I think [Mike] Tomlin believes he can fix players. Just draft a good receiver with a good background. It shouldn’t be that hard”.
While the Steelers did draft Pickens, who had character concerns coming out of Georgia, I’m not so sure there’s a pattern. Even going back to Antonio Brown, whose template prompted the question, he wasn’t known to be a problem right away. In fact, he was the “Chest Up Eyes Up Prayed Up” guy, the hardscrabble, good-natured fighting underdog.
Of course, we’re not talking about just character issues, but issues generally. The idea is that the Steelers look for talents a round or two above where they actually draft players. Pickens was available in the second round primarily because of his knee injury but also for behavioral reasons.
But to whom does this really apply? A player like Chase Claypool was certainly overdrafted based on talent, and Diontae Johnson was in the right spot. And neither of them came to the Steelers with “diva” issues—those developed as they tasted NFL success. The same goes for JuJu Smith-Schuster, who was beloved early in his career here. And nobody was talking about him as a first-round talent.
Really, I’m not so sure that I see the pattern being alleged. This is more about the Steelers drafting George Pickens, because he is the clearest example of a player more talented than his draft position. The only other name one might reasonably mention is Martavis Bryant, and that was over a decade ago.
The pattern of which we speak is a post-hoc assessment of the Steelers’ wide receiver woes more than anything else. But that might be even more problematic, as it suggests the Steelers themselves are the cause. Are they ruining wide receivers, or enabling the worst in them?
More problematic than anything else is the fact that recent years have disabused us of the notion that the Steelers have any “secret sauce” when it comes to drafting wide receivers. The only ones we still talk about in terms of talent without derision are Pickens and Bryant. Those are the two they really took a chance on in terms of character or health.
But what about James Washington and Markus Wheaton? What about Sammie Coates and Chase Claypool? It’s kind of hard to include these players in an argument in favor of the Steelers being a wide receiver factory. We’re talking about two second-round picks and two third-round picks, and none of them long-term starters. If this were a wide receiver factory, they would have gone out of business. No, the real problem is the Steelers just don’t draft wide receivers well. We’ve been fooling ourselves for years.
