Throughout their recent history, the Pittsburgh Steelers have been especially and specifically adept at selecting smaller receivers from smaller schools in the middle rounds, and turning them into stars. There is no better example than Antonio Brown, who the team took out of Western Michigan in the sixth round of the 2010 draft. We tend to forget this now in light of Brown’s… erratic behavior, but in his prime, he was the best route-runner in the game, and he could put just about any cornerback in a blender. There was Mike Wallace the year before, there was Emmanuel Sanders in the same draft that brought them Brown, and this year, there was Memphis’ Calvin Austin in the fourth round.
There was also Toledo’s Diontae Johnson, taken out of Toledo in the 2019 draft. At 5-foot-10 and 183 pounds, Johnson perfectly fit that prototype, and he’s coming off his first 1,000-yard receiving season, despite a passing game that was severely limited in the intermediate and deep levels.
Moving from Ben Roethlisberger to either Mason Rudolph or Kenny Pickett might not put too much of a shine on the quarterback position in the short term, but the Steelers made sure on Thursday to extend one of the better chips in their passing game.
The #Steelers and WR Diontae Johnson have agreed on a two-year, $36.71 million extension, source says. The sides worked last night and this morning to end his hold-in with a shorter deal than we’ve seen from others that allows him to be a free agent again after the 2024 season.
— Mike Garafolo (@MikeGarafolo) August 4, 2022
It’s a relatively low-ball deal considering all the receivers who have secured the bag this offseason, but for Johnson, it may be an ideal way to go. It’s also good for the Steelers, as Johnson hasn’t quite proven to be on the same level as a Terry McLaurin or A.J. Brown or D.K. Metcalf, but you can see how the arrow is pointing up.
“Diontae is not a big talker,” Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin said of Johnson in June. “He’s more of a doer, and I can appreciate that, and I’m aligned with that. Just putting his head down and working every day. He’s going to provide quality examples about how to go to work and there’s going to aid guys like [rookie receiver George] Pickens in the maturation process because he has visual examples of what he needs to do and how he needs to do it.
As far as what Johnson has done and how he needs to keep doing it, let’s go to the tape.