George Pickens has made one too many headlines for his poor performance on the field, and off it, there are a few black marks as well. Just recently, he expressed a lack of optimism about the upcoming season, hinting that he expects it to play out the same way it has again and again, with the Steelers getting ousted in the first round of the playoffs.
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Naturally, Pickens’ statements made a lot of Steelers fans furious. Now, analyst Denny Carter has brought up some interesting stats that are likely to deepen doubts about the wide receiver and make them question if he’s worth the trouble.
On the latest episode of the Rotoworld Football Show, Carter found it amusing that despite question marks being raised over Russell Wilson and Mike Tomlin’s future, no one’s batting an eyelid over the season George Pickens has had. With 59 receptions for 900 yards and 3 touchdowns over 14 games, Pickens has truly had an abysmal season.
For Denny, this season also showed one glaring weakness in Pickens’ game — his inability to catch deep balls. The analyst justified his claim by presenting an intriguing stat — Pickens, this season, has a contested catch rate of just 40%.
For context: A contested catch refers to a pass thrown by a QB to a WR who is closely guarded by a defender, making the catch more challenging. So, a 40% catch rate tells us one clear thing about Pickens — he misses more than half of the passes thrown his way when a defender is nearby.
While the WR has managed to offset this weakness by ranking among the league’s best in air yards, the problem remains the same: to convert those opportunities into real gains, Pickens first needs to improve his deep ball catch rate.
“[For the Steelers offense to work], they needed someone to get the ball to Pickens, and that did work for a little while, but it turns out, Pickens is not as good a deep ball catcher as I thought. So he did have 45% of the air yards for the Steelers, the 4th highest rate in the NFL and that does demonstrate some ability to command the ball… but he had a 40% contested catch rate – that’s in the range of Quenton Johnston and Marvin Harrison… that to me is a red flag…”
A stat like this really changes the complexion of the Russell Wilson situation with the Steelers. For instance, the Super Bowl winner ranked 33rd in the dropback success rate metric, while Justin Fields ranked 21st out of the 42 qualifying QBs.
Given that both QBs played with George Pickens on their side, this stat clearly indicates that Fields had a statistically better connection with his WR than Wilson did.
Based on this evidence alone, a case can be made for why the Steelers can see some merit in letting Russ go, while retaining two promising talents in Justin Fields and George Pickens. So, should Justin Fields really be the Steelers’ QB1 next season?
Ideally, Mike Tomlin should continue his strategy of signing a veteran bridge QB before letting Justin Fields take the reigns. As per the latest reports, Aaron Rodgers can be a good fit for this role with the Steelers.
As outlandish as this news seems from the outside, this is a move that does have a lot of merit, considering A-Rod statistically had a better season despite being in a woeful offensive setup.
The only question mark here is the drama that Rodgers brings with him. Considering how strongly the Steelers value their peace, it will be interesting to see if they consider the four-time MVP in their ranks.
