Steelers Rumors: Mike Tomlin’s Role In George Pickens-Cowboys Trade

Pittsburgh Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin was ready to move on from wideout George Pickens.

The offseason-long speculation surrounding the future between Pickens and Pittsburgh officially reached an end when the Steelers traded the 24-year-old to the Dallas Cowboys. In exchange, Pittsburgh acquired a 2026 third-round pick and a 2027 fifth-round pick from the Cowboys and attached a 2027 sixth-round pick to Pickens, going to Dallas. It was abrupt, somewhat predictable and a transaction linked to one name in Pittsburgh: Tomlin.

“What’s surprising to me is, from everything that I’ve heard, Mike Tomlin was the one that was in front of this all,” Steelers insider Mark Kaboly told Pittsburgh’s 93.7 The Fan on Wednesday. “It wasn’t Art (Rooney II). It wasn’t Omar (Khan). It was Mike, and then the organizational decision of its time to move on.”

Teams across the league monitored the Pickens situation in Pittsburgh, awaiting his potential trade availability. But everything took an interesting turn once the organization struck a blockbuster trade with the Seattle Seahawks for two-time Pro Bowler DK Metcalf and signed him to a five-year, $150 million extension. On the one hand, having Pickens and Metcalf seemed like a quarterback’s dream tandem, but on the other, not renewing Pickens’ contract was risky.

Pittsburgh couldn’t predict how Pickens would respond to playing alongside his presumed replacement, and without a payday.

Tomlin was willing to take the risk and ultimately pulled the plug. Pickens lasted three seasons with the Steelers after the team selected him in the second round (52nd overall) in the 2022 NFL Draft, and the move for Metcalf — in hindsight — wasn’t made to create a tandem; it was pulled off to provide Pittsburgh with a backup plan.

“(The Steelers) just didn’t trust him,” Kaboly said. “This was not something where he’d come and pound the door and say, ‘I want to be traded.’ He just wanted to play out. He wanted to do the Tee Higgins thing. So he had the mindset of being a guy that was gonna play by the rules this year, but how much can you really trust that? Because we’ve seen three years of — I mean, you can name three, four or five incidents that we know of. … How many things do we not know about?”

Pickens and Tomlins butted heads in Pittsburgh, so much so that the Georgia product got called out for his maturity after drawing two unsportsmanlike conduct flags against the Cincinatti Bengals in December.

“He’s just got to grow up, man,” Tomlin said on Week 13, per ESPN’s Brooke Pryor. “This is an emotional game, man. These divisional games are big. He’s got a target on his back because he’s George, he understands that. But he’s got to grow up. He’s got to grow up in a hurry.”

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