Pittsburgh Steelers George Pickens went to social media to air frustrations.
Pickens claimed he’s not a priority in Pittsburgh’s system and wants to be released.
“Free Me” Pickens also removed Steelers from his IG account. Pittsburgh does not have an elite offense by any stretch. And as we’ve seen through eight weeks, they get outgained every time they take the field. Don’t ask me how they’ve won five games, I simply have no idea how to explain it.
Even with the horrible offensive starts, Pittsburgh is still trying to get Pickens the ball. He hasn’t been targeted less than five times a game, and he’s been targeted at least seven times in five of the eight games.
Pickett has thrown for only 1,490 yards, and Pickett still has 521 receiving yards and three touchdowns on the year. He’s getting a third of the yards they gain through the air – as the number two receiver!.
After two straight 100-yard games for Pickens, that hasn’t happened. And he’s apparently not happy with the current state of affairs.
He had one catch for 22 yards in Sunday’s loss to the Jaguars. Last night, he had two catches for minus-one yards.
And while he would have had a touchdown pass if he had dragged a toe instead of planting a foot, the fact remains that the Steelers aren’t scheming to get him the ball. They aren’t getting passes to him whenever he’s in single coverage. Because, frankly, whenever he’s in single coverage, he’s open..
After his team’s 20-16 win over the Tennessee Titans on Thursday Night Football, Pickens vented his frustration over his role within the offense. He posted a since-deleted Instagram story in which he wrote “free me” in the bottom-right corner.
“No, man,” he said. “No.”
Why is that?
“Just strictly off of my mechanics,” Pickens said at the time. “I’d probably say the long speed, you know, guys panic a lot too. They give me a lot of space off the release. So I’d probably send my long speed, and if he tries to play over top, I’m a back-shoulder guy, too, so yeah, you can kind of say it’s unguardable.”
Now, a day after the win over the Titans, there’s social-media chatter about Pickens’s apparently stripping his accounts of All Things Steelers. Multiple tweets from a variety of eagle-eyed observers noted that Pickens posted “free me” in his Instagram story, before deleting it. Currently, there’s only one post on his Instagram page: A compilation of highlights from the University of Georgia.