What is currently happening with Pittsburgh Steelers wide receiver George Pickens isn’t a new phenomenon for Steelers receivers and something head coach Mike Tomlin should be all too familiar with. It seems that Tomlin is a magnet for attracting immature, petulant wide receivers with incredible amounts of talent.
You can go back to guys like Antonio Brown, JuJu Smith-Schuster, Chase Claypool and Martavis Bryant as other examples of talented receivers who carried baggage with them that made balancing the talent with the trouble a challenge.
Where does Pickens fit in this group after scrubbing his social media of Steelers connections after his second straight poor outing? And how does Tomlin deal with it? If history tells us anything, Tomlin is going to bury his head in the sand, hope it gets better on its own and downplay it completely. Tomlin ignored and enabled the bad behavior of Brown for years, allowing him to operate outside the rules of the team simply because he was an elite player. Not judging him for it, this is the way.
But is Pickens in that category? Not at this point. He’s a guy who hasn’t even finished his second season and needs to work on himself and more importantly, his game if he wants to succeed. Pickens’ highlight-reel catches draw lots of attention but you live and die by those. If he wants to be a go-to target week in and week out, Pickens needs to accept how he can get better as a player and put in the work.
