The Steelers placed Michael Pittman Jr. on injured reserve Saturday with a foot injury, ending the first chapter of a trade that already looks like a mistake. Pittman will miss at least four games. With Pittsburgh’s bye falling in Week 9, the earliest he can return is Week 10 against Cincinnati.
The timing is grim. Pittsburgh hosted the Colts on Sunday, the team that traded him in March, and did it without him. He aggravated the same foot at Wednesday’s practice. Head coach Mike McCarthy called it “the same foot” and described it as a multiple-week problem before the roster decision came down.
Seven Catches for a $59 Million Receiver
Pittman has seven receptions for 89 yards in three games this season. He opened with three catches for 58 yards, missed Week 2 against New England with the foot, then managed two catches for 16 yards against the Bengals and two for 15 against Cleveland.
Pittsburgh acquired him in March for a sixth-round pick, receiving a seventh-rounder back, then signed him to a three-year extension worth $59 million. The trade cost almost nothing. The extension is the issue, and six months in it looks like a serious misread of what Pittman is at this stage of his career.
He was a legitimate volume receiver in Indianapolis, with two 1,000-yard seasons on his record, but his production had already slid in his final two years there. Pittsburgh paid him as a solution anyway. The plantar fasciitis reported by Steelers Depot is the kind of nagging soft-tissue problem that tends to recur, which makes the back half of that contract a real concern rather than a hypothetical one.
Who Absorbs the Targets
DK Metcalf remains the focal point of the passing game, so this is not a crisis for Aaron Rodgers. The bigger question is who takes the intermediate work Pittman was supposed to handle.
Roman Wilson entered Week 5 with 16 receptions for 188 yards, second on the team in both, and was tied for the team lead in touchdowns. Germie Bernard has seven catches and moves into a larger role. Ben Skowronek offers the big-bodied blocking element that overlapped with Pittman’s skill set. Pittsburgh also elevated Brandon Smith from the practice squad for Sunday.
That group is thin enough that Pittsburgh should be in the market for a receiver before the November 10 deadline. The Steelers were 2-2 entering Week 5, firmly in the AFC playoff conversation, and running Rodgers out behind a one-receiver passing attack for a month wastes the only window this version of the roster has.
Pittsburgh has a schedule problem too. Four games covers the stretch where the AFC North gets decided, and the Steelers do not have the luxury of treating October as a holding pattern while they wait on a foot that has already failed twice this fall.
No surgery has been reported and no return date beyond the Week 10 eligibility marker has been given. McCarthy has not committed to Pittman reclaiming his old role once he is healthy, either, and nobody in the building has put a number on how much of the season is at risk. For a team that just handed him $59 million, that silence says plenty.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.