Dynasty Outlook
March 10
Pickens is a target for the end of the first or early second round for rookie drafts, and is WR41 in our overall dynasty ranks. For those who prefer to take big swings in dynasty, Pickens should get bumped up some when considering who to select in rookie drafts. He comps to some WRs who have peaked highly in overall dynasty ranks over the years, but possesses a cavernous floor. Still, his early-career production was impressive enough to warrant this risk. Pickens’ health will be something to monitor throughout the process, as well as any medical re-checks. With a clean bill of health and quality draft position, he is a candidate to move up our ranks.
Profile Summary
George Pickens is a three-year WR who missed most of his junior year due to a spring ACL tear. He was dominant right away as a true freshman, and was one of the best prospects in the country prior to his injury. Both the scouts and the data would agree that the range of outcomes on Pickens is extremely wide. He was healthy for the NFL Combine, and ran a 4.47 in the 40-yard dash. That may have teams feeling more confident that he is back to the player he was two years ago, and stabilize his draft position in the early second round.
Vitals
Age (as of 12/31/21) — 20.8
Experience — 3 years
Height — 75.25
Weight — 195 pounds
Hand Size — 8.75 inches
Arm Length — 32.375 inches
Wingspan — 77.375
Forty — 4.47 seconds
Vertical — 33 inches
Broad — 125 inches
By the Numbers
Pickens got off to a fast start at Georgia, averaging close to two receiving yards per team pass attempt, and narrowly missing a breakout by decimals as a true freshman (the number above is rounded up). His sophomore season featured almost identical production, though he missed a few games due to injury. At the conclusion of the 2020 season, Pickens was considered to be one of, if not the best, WR prospect in the 2022 class.
Unfortunately, he tore his ACL in the spring of 2021. This cost him basically his entire junior season. Pickens appeared in four games, but was clearly limited just eight months after the injury. It is difficult to hold that against him statistically, but it does muddy the water as to just who Pickens is at this stage of his career.
What the Scouts are Saying
Lance Zierlein noted Pickens’ potential wide range of outcomes.
Lanky perimeter wideout with exciting ball skills but in desperate need of additional play strength and a clean bill of health. Resilient to make it back so quickly after an ACL tear, but needs to show quick-cutting ability for route-running. Pickens possesses borderline elite ball skills with in-air adjustments, strong hands, and an enormous catch radius. However, he fails to put defenders on his hip and command the catch space to make his work less cluttered. The routes need more polish and physicality, but he has the athletic ability to become a viable target on all three levels as a likely Day 2 draft pick with a little wider gap between ceiling and floor than NFL teams might like.
Right now, there isn’t a lot of other trusted scouting information out there given how little we’ve seen Pickens play of late.
Draft Projection
Pickens currently has an expected draft position of 43.5 on Grinding the Mocks, which sources mock drafts around the interwebs. Mock Draft Database is a similar service that has Pickens 36th overall. He went 39th in Dane Brugler’s post-combine mock draft. As of now, it appears that Pickens is slated to come off the board somewhere in the early second round.
Comparable Players
I use Principal Component Analysis to evaluate WR prospects. In simplest terms, this kind of analysis looks at relevant data points to find the closest comparable WRs in past drafts. I prefer this to a model output — which yields only a single result — as it can display the possible range of outcomes for a prospect.
Note that the analysis itself isn’t telling us how good a player is; it is simply returning the most similar players. It is then up to us to layer in context and past results to see how good we think this player may be.
Observing Pickens through the lens of comps gets to be pretty dicey given his career path, so we should be less confident in these results than for other WRs. I made two adjustments to Pickens to help get a better view of what he might be at the NFL level. The first thing is I removed his junior season completely. He had five catches in four games, and the coaching staff admitted to taking care of him during his return to the field. It was clearly not representative of his ability. The second adjustment was crediting Pickens with a breakout for his freshman season. To four decimal places, his true freshman dominator was 0.2975.
With these caveats in mind, Pickens’ range of outcomes seems fairly representative of what we can expect. It is remarkably wide. We have quality hits such as Calvin Ridley, Santonio Holmes, and JuJu Smith-Schuster, and absolute busts like Aaron Dobson, Denzel Mims, and Jalen Reagor (sorry, Eagles fans — it’s over). There are also a couple of guys you may have never heard of (in a bad way). There is a path to Pickens popping as a top dynasty asset, but it’s a narrow path.
