‘He doesn’t like that’ – Dallas Cowboys are planning to give George Pickens something that will take his game to the next level
The Dallas Cowboys already boast one of the NFL’s best passing offenses. But their plans with George Pickens will take it to the next level.
George Pickens is one scary dude. But the Dallas Cowboys are working hard to make him even scarier.
That is saying a lot for a player who earned All-Pro honors last season. But head coach Brian Schottenheimer revealed his action plan to make it happen. And it starts with alignment.
Cowboys to move George Pickens around
“As we talk about evolving, I would say the biggest thing we’re doing is we want to move George around more,” Schottenheimer told reporters at the end of minicamp. “He’s not just going to live at X. He doesn’t like that anyways. We want to put him in the slot some. We want to get him isolated some to the front side, the same side as the tight end.”
Playing in the slot would be a major change for Pickens. Out of the 91 receivers with the most targets last season, Pickens ranked 90th in slot snaps percentage at 10%, per Pro Football Focus.
Based on the production he had, that shouldn’t be a concern. You don’t always have to be multiple to be efficient. Pickens was one of the best receivers in football despite not moving around.
And yet, if the Cowboys find a way to make CeeDee Lamb and Pickens interchangeable, the passing game will only get much more difficult for defenses to figure out. Lamb is already very efficient from the slot, so expect him to remain the main guy for the job, but defenses will have a lot more to worry with both receivers lining up everywhere.
As far as the football IQ that goes into playing the two positions, Schottenheimer isn’t worried.
“When George came back, I was a little bit, not worried, but I was like, ‘it’s going to be interesting to see how much he remembers because we’ve made minor adjustments,” Schottenheimer said. “But he was on it, man. In all the mocks and the walkthroughs that we were doing, he was terrific.”
That’s not all, though
While Pickens moving around will be what makes most of the headlines, that’s not all the Cowboys are working on to make him a more complete wide receiver.
“But the biggest thing is also having complements off of routes that I know everyone’s running last year,” Schottenheimer said. “You guys [the media] basically tried to stop our slant game because he was so good at slants, and you guys kept asking me about it every week. So everybody kept jumping inside and making it hard on us.”
The Cowboys passing game was one of the NFL’s finest last year. It should only get better as Pickens evolves, which also highlights how valuable his prescence at mandatory minicamp was.
“That’s the biggest thing — how do we complement the things that we know he is so good at, that the whole league knows, the whole world knows he’s good at, but we’ve got things off of that,” Schottenheimer added. “He’s a fun tool to mess around with.”