Things changed for George Pickens forever when he realized that he could just knock guys on their asses. It was his freshman year at Georgia, and Pickens noticed that in the first milliseconds after the snap, cornerbacks sat in a “toilet” position. So he just started pushing them down.
“That’s part of my game, the absurdness,” Pickens says. “Nobody ever thought to do this. Cornerbacks are worried about their feet, their hand placement, and they don’t realize they are on their heels in a seated chair position. All I have to do is push. And that was a shock to everybody because people are like, ‘It’s not illegal, but I never thought to do it.’ So it’s become one of my go-tos.” He chuckles as I show him a compilation video of him doing this at the NFL level last year on Pittsburgh Steelers run plays: shoving Detroit Lions defensive back Will Harris to the ground in the preseason, then Seattle Seahawks rookie Coby Bryant. He says some cornerbacks operate in such a vulnerable stance that he could knock them down by just blowing on them. Instead, he shoves them as hard as he can to be sure.
That absurdness Pickens references is not some sideshow or piece of trivia—it’s a style he’s been able to build his career (and life) around. It is the reason there are very few players better at getting open in hopeless situations than the Steelers wideout. He wants to create chaos downfield because that’s the environment in which he thrives. The only rule is that it has to work. “I play so it looks like I’m just joking,” Pickens said.
With this strategy, Pickens pokes holes in defenses that are governed by strict rules of scheme. He says there is a specific type of technical cornerback that he can exploit by being alarmingly untechnical in his moves—adding in little ruses at the line of scrimmage, or wiggles in the route. As luck would have it, Pickens says, this type of cornerback is usually very good, and it’s the type he’s likely to face going forward. He has a name for them. “I always kill DBs who are overthinkers,” he says. “And what’s crazy is the overthinkers are Xavien Howard or Jalen [Ramsey], and those are the best guys. And that’s why I think most DBs can’t really check me.”
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The short scouting report on Pickens’s rookie season is that he caught passes most people don’t: He had the most contested catches by a rookie that Pro Football Focus has ever charted. He finished second in the NFL last year in catch rates over expectation, a metric that measures catch rates relative to the difficulty of the catch. (Remember this now-famous clip of a catch he made against the Browns last September?) He did this while stretching the field vertically—no one in the NFL ran more straightforward “go” routes last season. And only two players produced more big plays per opportunity. Rookie quarterback Kenny Pickett had near-flawless numbers when targeting Pickens last season—the Steelers’ only two explosive touchdowns (they ranked last in the league) were thrown by Pickett to Pickens.
“You don’t find many receivers that can catch the ball any kind of way,” veteran cornerback Patrick Peterson explains. “It’s just very, very hard to find those guys. He does remind me a lot of DeAndre Hopkins. Same body structure and deceptive speed to get behind you.”
Pickens tells me he’s trying to emulate A.J. Green’s elite catch radius, and in our talk he also compares himself to Mr. Fantastic and a noodle. He says his game is ambidextrous—allowing him to spin either way out of contact with a corner and get open—while defensive backs can’t do the same. He mentions the turn he did against the Dolphins last season for a touchdown. “The guy just didn’t know what I was gonna do,” he says. There’s a lot of that going around.
You cannot tell the story of Pickens’s game without talking about his personality, and vice versa. The way he looks at life is also the way he looks at football. He describes a play from last year against the Raiders in which he ran a fade route but came off the line in a run-block posture, waiting until the last second to try to catch the ball. The goal was simply to be weird. To play absurdly and show a cornerback something they’d never seen before, however subtle. “He’s the best athlete I’ve ever played with,” says Pickett. Then the QB tells me to go find George to ask him about aliens.
On the other side of the field, Pickens is signing autographs for a large group of fans—a good number of whom are carrying Pickens jerseys, and one of whom holds a photo of the catch against the Browns—and I tell him about Pickett’s request. Pickens explains that the night before, he’d told a few teammates that the best Earthly greeting party for any extraterrestrial life would be LeBron James (“He looks like an alien, and he’s the only one to save us,” Pickens says), Rihanna, and Mike Epps (“He’s a comedian who could distract them and shit”).
Pickens channels his personality into everything on the field. He does not shy away from the idea that he plays angry—given the shoving of DBs and love of physicality in his routes and blocking—but insists he is not an angry person. It’s deeper than that. “The stuff that I do, bro, I feel like I’m the best in the whole world,” Pickens says. “I’m big, I’m fast, low 4.4 [speed]. Catch radius is crazy. So every time I get out on the field, I do kind of play angry because I should get the ball on every play if you just look at the size and the frame. If I was a coach, I’d just throw to him every time. But that’s not how the NFL works. So every time I’m out there, that’s why I throw the blocks. I love getting the ball, and when I’m not getting the ball I play angry so the attention is back on me. I basically draw attention to myself.”
He says he learned this in youth football when he played running back and realized how much he liked the attention. “The attention was the best part,” he says. When he later switched to receiver and realized the focus would be off him on run plays or plays designed for someone else, he decided to find attention anyway. “When we run the ball, I’m gonna make it fun for myself, too,” Pickens says. He means being an eager—or at least highlight-reel worthy—blocker.
I ask Pickens to clarify the “best in the world” comment. Did he mean that he’s the best in the world at a particular set of skills? Or that he’s the best—he cuts me off. “Receiver in the world. I’m not going to lie to you,” Pickens says. People don’t realize, he says, how much receivers are judged without the context of their circumstances. “If you want a receiver, you create a player, it’s ‘Oh, I’m gonna put his blocking 99, catching 99, speed 99.’ That’s me. Anybody else, it’s almost like 85s, but they’ve got [Aaron Rodgers] as their quarterback; 90 but he’s got the old Patriots [offense]. This shit is rigged, bro,” he says with a big smile. Pickens is laughing, but he isn’t joking. He loved his chemistry with Pickett last season, by the way, so do not take the above as a dig. “But yeah, shit is rigged. As far as what you’d use to build a receiver, I’m the ideal guy.”
I do not believe that Pickens is the best receiver in the world, but I believe that he believes he is.
Pickens was picked 52nd overall in last year’s draft after a knee injury limited him to four games and five catches in his final season at Georgia. I read a little bit to him from a Bruce Feldman predraft paneling of scouts and coaches in which a wide receivers coach said Pickens had red flags and a “lot of growing up to do.” Pickens says he dismissed those stories because scouts and coaches were just sharing subjective opinions. To illustrate this, he asks what I’d say if he said he didn’t like my shirt. I explain that my shirt, a terry cloth short-sleeve button-down, actually rules. “See? That’s my opinion and I can say it, though,” Pickens says. “It doesn’t make it a bad shirt. It’s a good shirt for bro.” He’s right about that part. But Pickens says he was generally more jokey in predraft meetings, and he believes teams preferred more serious candidates, something he didn’t really want to be. “I know all the plays. I know what to do. I take care of my body. I don’t know what ‘growing up’ they wanted,” he says. Steelers GM Omar Khan, for his part, says he saw a guy with a “chance to be a star” the first time he watched Pickens play and that he’s loved having Pickens in the building. But Pickens says he is still hugely pissed off about falling to 52nd, and he uses it to fuel his aforementioned on-field anger. “I will probably keep playing like that forever,” he says of his vengeance tour.
Most people who are around Pickens think he’s got more than a chance to be a star. Even on the talent-stacked practice fields in Athens, Pickens became something of a folk hero. On his first recruiting visit to Georgia, tight end Darnell Washington happened upon a player-led seven-on-seven game. “I saw George cook every person he went against,” Washington says. The year before he got to Georgia, offensive lineman Broderick Jones started to see Pickens highlights on Instagram and stopped scrolling every time. He saw a practice highlight of a one-handed catch: “Body out of control, it was just stupid.” Then Jones saw a catch against Murray State in Pickens’s freshman year in which the QB overthrew him “and he went and got it. He dove forward and hit like a front flip. That’s when I knew George was out of his mind for real.” Both Washington and Jones were selected by the Steelers in the most recent NFL draft. And these sorts of tales are only accumulating—Pickett tells me about a one-handed behind-the-head catch Pickens made in practice last year. “Horizontal to the ground. The craziest thing I’ve ever seen,” Pickett says.
Perhaps the only thing that could rival seeing that would be seeing Pickens’s Instagram. “I’m a big troll,” Pickens tells me. He uses his account—a strange, avant-garde place that has the feel of an art installation—to be just that. Doritos in his hand while he wears a mask and stands on a kitchen counter? Sure. Standing in front of the TV with a hood on while getting drafted? You bet. He suggests he uses it as a way to poke fun at the fame he’s accumulated. “I’m not a celebrity. I’m not ‘George Pickens.’ I’m just like you, bro,” he says. But, he says, I probably eat better than he does: He subsists mostly on ramen noodles, chips, and Caribbean food (“Oxtails go crazy”), and he says his diet would shock most people. When I ask Washington, his college teammate, how Pickens is so athletic on ramen noodles, he says it’s “the grace of God.”
So where does Pickens go from here? Up, probably. He racked up 801 yards and 12 starts last season. His coaches, ironically, want to see more consistency in blocking outside of his big hits, and offensive coordinator Matt Canada believes the floor on Pickens’s consistency will rise. “He became a YouTube phenomenon because he was catching some guys off guard,” says receivers coach Frisman Jackson. “But I told him, ‘You’re not going to catch many people off guard [this year].’ People know what move you’re going to try to do.”
There’s also the matter of scheme. Jackson said Pickens is working now on what happens when the defense opens up because they commit to stopping his vertical threat. “I told him, ‘What are we doing when teams take the go ball away? When they say, “Hey man, this guy is phenomenal at the go ball, we’re taking it away.” What are we doing?’” He told Pickens to work on his curls, slants, bang 8s, and comebacks. Canada outlines how excited he is about the number of routes you can build off of a vertical threat like Pickens.
There’s some evidence this game plan is already working. When I ask Peterson about the chaos and absurdity Pickens plays with, he says that the day before, Pickens “gave me a little wiggle” at the top of his route, to the point that Peterson thought he was running a dig but it was really an out. At that part of the route, “a lot of the younger receivers are starting to do this because that’s what Justin [Jefferson] does a lot,” Peterson says. “He makes the route look a certain way, but he’s running in a whole different direction. It does put us [defenders] in disarray a little bit because it’s ‘What the heck is he doing? He’s got his arms going this way but his lower half is that way,’ so it does sort of put us in a discombobulated situation.”
Pickens says the go balls were a good introduction between a rookie quarterback and receiver and mentions adding in more dig routes, posts, and option routes this season. But he believes his style trumps the actual route. “A lot of receivers are route guys. But like, if I can run a sorry route and still catch it … I just feel like if you up your catch radius and you boost your hands, that will kind of take care of everything.” In short, he wants a little chaos. A little weirdness. Of course he does.
