Welcome to DK Sports Radio and a new Daily Shot of Steelers, my every-weekday, half-hour program on the local football franchise. Today's episode: It's not that Diontae Johnson had a lousy 2020, but more that he's not exactly standing out enough.
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THE TRANSCRIPT
I don't think anybody could argue that the Steelers went through the 2020 season with three maybe four. Pretty good NFL wide receivers. But do they have a true number one, and maybe more important than that? Does it matter?
Diontae Johnson was, by every reasonable definition, the Steelers' No. 1 receiver in 2020. And that applies whether you take it by statistics or even by the vague concept of being the main man on the depth chart. He led the team in yards, he led the team in targets. And when you lead the team in targets, your quarterback's telling you who the No. 1 receiver is because he throwing the ball your direction more often than anybody else's seeing it.
But a No. 1 receiver?
Let's start with whether or not the Steelers have one. Johnson had 923 receiving yards on 88 catches. It's, I mean, that's a nice season. He also missed a game in there. And then, of course, you'll recall that he was benched for half of a game, which wasn't exactly something that he wanted, because that happened as a result of his drops. I don't know if you realize this or not, but his 15 drops were most in the league. And most of those, you'll recall, happened in one really grisly stretch that forced Mike Tomlin to keep him on the sideline for the second half of a game. Looking at the rest of his numbers, he had seven touchdowns while the team leaders tied were Chase Claypool and JuJu Smith-Schuster with nine each. He averaged 62 yards receiving per game. These things don't jump out. They don't scream No. 1 receiver. He didn't rank in the top 40 in the NFL in most receiving categories.
You can argue that it's smarter and more effective, particularly for a quarterback who isn't throwing downfield, to have lots of different options. You could argue that it's to everyone's credit that the yardage totals were as close as they were with Diontae at 923, Claypool 873, JuJu 831 and, for that matter, James Washington, who really should have played a lot more than he did, with 392 on 30 catches along with five touchdowns. That's a pretty good -- there's that terminology again -- receiving corps.
But with the Steelers and Ben, you'd be better off by just focusing on one or two guys. We've seen around the National Football League that some of the better teams, including two of the best teams in the AFC, rely very heavily on a single receiver. Kansas City obviously does that with Tyreek Hill. Buffalo does that with Stefon Diggs. But eventually that caught up to both of them. Once teams realized, hey, if we do everything that we can to take Diggs out of the game -- which, by the way, was something Keith Butler should have figured out up in Orchard Park -- as we saw in the Super Bowl, Patrick Mahomes had all kinds of issues that day, but Hill was taken out of the game. He'll wasn't even visible until the second half of the Super Bowl.
So you can make a very easy argument that you should be spreading the ball around, and that's the way to go. And, you know, that applies also to the tight ends and the running backs. You know, the more the merrier, right?
Well, I don't know because for a team that struggled as much as it did on third downs, in particular, third and fourth down. I want that go-to guy. I want that guy who you find when it's absolutely needed. And I'm not feeling that the Steelers have that out of this group, in part because I'm not sure that they're allowing it to happen.
Know who I think should be the No. 1 receiver on this team?
Yeah, Claypool.
Now, not to be anointed. Claypool had his own issues. He had some drops, as well. He had issues getting off the line of scrimmage. He had issues particularly later in the season, which is a little bit curious, but maybe not considering he was a rookie and had never played that many games before. But he had issues using his hands to fight for the football. We didn't always see him really, really battle for the ball, you know, Washington-style. But he can and will get physically stronger. Everyone has acknowledged that the whole Mapletron/Megatron whatever thing was only going to apply once he got more bulk to him without sacrificing his speed and his agility. He does need to get physically stronger, particularly with his arms, his wrists, his hands. And he needs to fight a lot harder than he did for a 50/50 or a 40/60 or even a 30/70 football that's up in the air.
But he's the guy I'd like to see them lean more toward because what you saw from Claypool, particularly when he was on his game, was that he could do anything. He could stretch the field, he could go in a straight route like Martavis Bryant or Mike Wallace. He could come back to the football. He could do things spontaneously he could make guys miss once he caught the ball. He could do those quick slants, but turn them into something he did reverses. He did end-arounds. He did a lot of different things.
As for JuJu, we've been over this. He led the team with 97 catches, but had 831 yards to show for it, one of the lowest yards-per-catch figures of any starter in football. He just didn't make anything happen. And if you go back to JuJu's rookie year and think about some of the plays that he made, they weren't necessarily bombs when he would have those big touchdowns. How did he get them? You remember? Yeah, Ben would just flick him the ball at a certain spot on a field and, because everybody was paying attention to Antonio Brown, he would just take off pulld away from people. None of that's happened the last two years. And unlike 2019, you can't blame 2020 on the quarterback because he was working with Ben. I'm on the record as saying that I don't think they should make a significant effort to keep him. I don't care about his branding or anything else. He was the third-best receiver on this team. I think his spot could be seamlessly taken by bumping up Washington and then maybe finding other depth options.
But you're still going to need a No. 1.