PITTSBURGH — By sending George Pickens to the Dallas Cowboys earlier this week, the Steelers guaranteed that yet another wide receiver drafted by the team won’t see a second contract in Pittsburgh.
Of 16 extension-eligible wide receivers drafted by the team since 2007, three have received second contracts. Five played out their four-year deals and departed in free agency. Two were traded during their rookie deals. Four were cut before finishing those deals and one was signed off the Steelers’ practice squad to another team’s active roster.
Though the organization has a reputation of successfully drafting and developing its wide receivers, the Steelers’ recent history reflects the leaguewide challenges that come with evaluating the position and cultivating homegrown talent.
The first predicament teams face is sifting through the sheer volume of players at the position, one talent evaluator told ESPN. Thanks in part to pass-heavy offenses and a scarcity of elite cornerback play in college football, each draft class has a wealth of wide receivers with big numbers. Those college offenses often require receivers to run far fewer routes than they would in the NFL, meaning there’s more guesswork involved in determining a wide receiver’s NFL potential.
“It’s a true projection,” the evaluator said.
Though most of their receivers didn’t get second contracts, the Steelers had a stretch of success from 2009-10 in identifying and drafting Mike Wallace, Emmanuel Sanders and Antonio Brown. But in many cases, teams across the league struggle to hit on wide receivers. And as the haystack around the needle grows thicker with each draft class, bringing in a veteran via trade is a preferred roster-building method.
The Steelers did just that this offseason by acquiring DK Metcalf in a trade from Seattle and forgoing a wide receiver in the draft. The team also signed veteran Robert Woods to a one-year deal, continuing a recent trend of rounding out its receiving corps with older players like Allen Robinson and Van Jefferson.
And after bringing in a known performer in Metcalf — and subsequently signing him to a four-year, $132 million contract extension — the door opened to finally move on from Pickens.
Pickens is the sixth receiver in the Mike Tomlin era to be drafted by Pittsburgh and eventually traded to another team. Five of those players — Pickens, Diontae Johnson, Chase Claypool, Martavis Bryant and Brown — were dealt in part because of concerns involving their conduct. The trade that sent Sammie Coates, a 2015 third-round pick, to the Cleveland Browns was more about his injury history and roster fit. But general manager Omar Khan said the pattern of trades isn’t going to impact how the organization builds its receiver depth.
“Some of that’s just really coincidence how it’s played out with the position. We’re always trying to get good players regardless of what position it’s at and at any point in the year,” Khan said.
“We’re chasing a championship, and every decision we make is based on trying to win a championship not only in the future but this year.”
Even before trading Pickens, Steelers owner Art Rooney II was asked in his end-of-season news conference if the pattern of troubling behavior from Steelers wide receivers could impact how the team evaluates the position.
“I think every team seems to have one or two guys in that room that you have to manage them correctly,” Rooney said in January. “I still think George has enough talent that we’ve got to try to work and see if we can get him to fulfill the talent that he really has. Who knows if we can get there? We’ll see. But when you have guys that are as talented as some of the guys you’re probably thinking of, you try to work with them and have them help you be successful.”
But in the past five months, the Steelers reached the same determination with Pickens that they previously reached with Brown, Johnson, Bryant and Claypool.
While it’s unclear if the Steelers saw warning signs of potentially disruptive behavior in their predraft evaluations of the four previously traded wide receivers, Pickens had several red flags. He was ejected for fighting in a game against Georgia Tech in 2019, and as a result was suspended for the first half of the SEC championship game against LSU. At least one NFL team took him off their draft board after being turned off by his behavior during his predraft visit, according to a high-ranking team executive.
The Steelers, though, dismissed any character concerns.
“I don’t even understand where that’s coming from,” Tomlin said in October 2022 when asked about Pickens’ playing style deterring other teams in the predraft process. “This guy is doing everything that we ask him to. He’s playing good ball. A lot of people have incidents in their college background. I’m certainly not going to hold that against him. We did our due diligence. We were completely comfortable with his character. He has displayed that since he’s been here. So, I somewhat resent that.”
And yet, those incidents continued through his professional career. Outbursts at teammates and throwing his helmet on the sideline. Grabbing another player by his face mask and yanking him down after the game. Fighting with another player during an onside kick return. Fighting with a different player during a Hail Mary attempt.
For as talented as Pickens is, the noise around everything else that comes with him seemed to reach a crescendo for the Steelers.
“I can’t really change anyone’s opinion,” Pickens said of outside perceptions during his introductory news conference call in Dallas. “Me, personally, I just continue to grow. I feel like everybody in the world has to grow. You get older and older as you grow, and I’m just trying to build a winning culture, which they already have at the Cowboys. I’m just glad to be joining it.”
Though Pickens could still change the narrative depending on the outcome of his Steelers career, recent history suggests the Steelers are successful at timing these decisions.
Prior to Pickens, the team’s two previous trades involving drafted wide receivers sent Johnson to the Carolina Panthers for cornerback Donte Jackson and a picks swap, while Claypool went to Chicago for a No. 32 pick the Steelers used to take CB Joey Porter Jr. Claypool, once a second-round pick, managed just 217 total receiving yards with the Bears and Miami Dolphins. He wasn’t on a roster in 2024.
Johnson, meanwhile, had 375 combined receiving yards as he pinballed around the league in tumultuous stints with the Carolina Panthers, Baltimore Ravens and Houston Texans.
And perhaps the most notable well-timed trade by the Steelers was the move to send Brown to the Raiders after the 2018 season.
The Steelers won three divisional titles and three playoff games from 2014 to 2018 thanks in large part to Brown’s consecutive 1,000-yard seasons. But an escalation of the wide receiver’s actions during the 2018 season — skipping practices, blowing up at teammates and getting into a social media altercation with a team employee — led to the team dealing him in the offseason.
Though Brown won a Super Bowl as a member of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers after leaving Pittsburgh, his final years in the NFL were punctuated by even more drama. He finished with just 1,084 yards over three years after posting six consecutive seasons of at least 1,000 yards.
In the timing of the trade and its aftermath, the Steelers appeared to maximize Brown’s talent while minimizing his negative traits.
Trading away one of the team’s best offensive playmakers — especially after the NFL draft — with seemingly limited options to backfill the WR2 position is risky. But it’s just as risky to keep a player who incurred costly on-field penalties, showed up late to games, threatened to fight a fan in a social media comment and wrote an explicit message on his eye black for a prime-time game.
If the Steelers’ prior experience is any indication, it “made sense for everyone.”
