The Wide Receiver Matrix
Brandon Aiyuk's descent only gets crazier. George Pickens was electric, but there's a reason he was traded. This is a volcanic position in every way. (Hey, TO!) Where's the sweet spot for NFL teams?
Brandon Aiyuk has not caught a pass in a football game in 632 days. It was a hideous sight. Safety Chamarri Conner, with perfect timing, drills him and the San Francisco 49ers wide receiver’s knee bends. Both the ACL and MCL tear.
No way could anyone predict the madness to come.
One bizarre Instagram video to the next, it becomes increasingly more difficult to see Aiyuk catch his next pass.
This month, he’s been intent on alienating his greatest ally. After seeing a video of quarterback Jayden Daniels chuckling at a fan screaming “Fuck Brandon Aiyuk!” the receiver posted a video of his own and tagged Daniels to proclaim, “You’re on my team now. You follow my rules. Boy, I’m a grown ass man. You’re gonna have to start running behind your momma and I might believe what you’re talking about.”
Meanwhile, his only clear path back to the field is to petition with the NFL for reinstatement from the reserve/left squad list. Once reinstated, he could show up for 49ers training camp and then finally get the release he desires.
Aiyuk has repeated he will not do this.
The 49ers have no incentive to do a thing.
Aiyuk’s public relations team may consist of a pile of dirty laundry.
“I’ll tell you what,” Aiyuk promised, “If I get a job back in the NFL, I’ll still be on my bullshit on social media.”
Comforting.
Easy to forget that this wide receiver caught 75 balls for 1,342 yards and seven touchdowns in 2023. His acrobatic catch vs. Detroit propelled those 49ers into the Super Bowl. The ensuing contract battle was intense, but he eventually got paid: four years, $120 million. So, what happened? How did this situation deteriorate in such catastrophic fashion? That’s what I asked one former 49ers coach around for Aiyuk’s ascent. There must be valuable lessons for other teams to take at this volcanic position.
Because let’s face it. Teams that seek boy scouts at wide receiver won’t win anything.
An element of risk is required. Finding that line is the tricky part.
This coach cites a Maya Angelou quote: “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”
Red flags were obvious.
“When you’re in a contract year — especially at receiver — they are being taught, they are being trained, they are being groomed: ‘Hey, for one year, be on your best behavior. For eight months, dude, can you just not go to clubs? Can you just stay out of the limelight? Can you just be a model citizen for seven to eight months? If you’re a model citizen, you ball out, then you get your money, you get your contract and then, hey, you can kind of go back to being who you were.’”
Aiyuk began his 49ers career in Kyle Shanahan’s doghouse.
Professionalism issues were obvious. But so was Aiyuk’s talent, and that talent helped Shanahan look past red flags. Aiyuk worked his way into the starting lineup of a contender, earned 100+ targets in back-to-back years and put together that excellent ’23 season to command a top-of-market deal. Pro football players make their real money on the second contract. For eight months, Aiyuk was a good soldier and the 49ers came within overtime of hoisting the Lombardi Trophy.
Somebody was bound to pay him.
“But you’ve got to be careful who you pay,” this coach said.
Teams shouldn’t watch Aiyuk sabotage his own career and become forever petrified by any wide receiver with attitude. Their job is to intimidate, dominate, humiliate a cornerback. Attitude is expected. Some shit to him, is the official scouting term. Look at the same offseason Aiyuk got paid. In the ’24 draft, Malik Nabers was the player with such an edge. Marvin Harrison Jr. was the quieter, safer option. Their careers trended two very different directions immediately. If Shanahan knew it’d get this dark with Aiyuk, he would’ve traded him to Pittsburgh.
Most receivers keep a small circle. Aiyuk’s was particularly small. This coach didn’t think he was an oddball. Rather, he simply didn’t hang out with many teammates. Even back then, this coach recalls him as more of a loner.
Coaches, execs, players. Everyone in the NFL is flabbergasted Aiyuk would walk away from his $120 million contract. They know he wants to play for the Washington Commanders but ask this question: Why would the Commanders want him? Jayden Daniels enters a critical Year 3. Dan Quinn needs to win and cares deeply about culture. The math is tough to add up.
Aiyuk clearly isn’t playing for the money. In one of his IG videos, he literally throws wads of cash onto the ground. Say he’s on the vet’s minimum with the Commanders. This coach wonders what’d happen when he only gets three targets in a game. It’s not like Aiyuk would be a featured piece in the gameplan. (“Because you can’t trust him. You can’t count on it.”) All sad considering what could’ve been. At one point, Aiyuk successfully escaped Shanahan’s doghouse and was viewed internally as an untouchable asset right there with George Kittle, Christian McCaffrey. This West Coast offense didn’t flow through the wide receiver. Unlike other schemes, the 49ers don’t force the ball to an “X.” Still, he was valued by one of the sport’s best coaches.
Even through a contested negotiation — WR contracts leaguewide skyrocketing — I was told repeatedly that the 49ers weren’t going to let Aiyuk leave the building.
Now? Teams across the NFL likely view him as more of a toxic chemical that must be kept away from the facility. Niners great Steve Young has even expressed deep concern for the receiver’s wellbeing.
A mind-boggling fall, but Aiyuk isn’t the first and Aiyuk won’t be the last volatile receiver to get paid. GMs and coaches view themselves as uniquely qualified to fix receivers and, flatly, talent is too tantalizing. A dilemma that reminds me of the outlandish crazy-hot matrix viral video inspired by Barney on “How I Met Your Mother.” Obviously, all of our wives and all women reading today neatly fit into the unicorn category. That goes without saying. (Love ya, hun!) But the bespectacled middle-aged man in a shirt and tie might as well be drawing up a chart on the NFL Wide Receiver. A similar paradigm is at play. Rare is the insanely talented receiver devoid of baggage. It’s why all of us in sports media are guilty of glamorizing the receiver who punches in, kicks ass, punches out. This time last year, Drake London sat down with Go Long.
At the line of scrimmage, your mission is to reach inside the proverbial chest of a cornerback, grab his heart and spike it into the turf. Arrogance is required to excel. Selfishness is inevitable. And the most extreme example of the century — perhaps all-time — was a topic on our most recent episode of “Real Football:” Terrell Owens.
Eagles great Brian Westbrook relived all drama from TO’s two years with the team. A clear Hall of Fame talent in real time Owens bounced team, to team, to team, to team, to team. The peak of drama was ’04 and ’05 with quarterback Donovan McNabb.
No player is more qualified to objectively dissect this relationship in hindsight than Westbrook. He remains friends with both.
He still remembers the Saturday meeting before TO’s first game as an Eagle. In front of everyone, he said that if he doesn’t get the ball nine out of the first 15 plays, “we’ve got a problem.” Head coach Andy Reid and McNabb were much obliged. He got his touches all season long and backed it up. Owens ushered in what Westbrook calls a “Hall of Fame work ethic.” Through the Eagles’ previous three runs to the NFC Championship Game, receivers and backs would typically sprint an extra 10 to 15 yards after catching the ball. TO took every catch to the house.
“We’re all looking around like, ‘What is this dude doing? He’s about to make practice 20 minutes longer just doing this,’” Westbrook said. “But in his mind, he was scoring every single play. That’s a mindset change for us. And so now offensively, I started doing it. Everybody else started doing it. As an offense, we started thinking we can score every single play. That was directly from TO.”
Of course, Philadelphia reached the Super Bowl where Owens famously gritted through a broken fibula and a torn ligament in his ankle against New England. Westbrook recalled doctors telling TO, point blank, he cannot play and Owens vowed to sign any waiver required. He caught nine balls for 122 yards in the 24-21 loss.
Problems, however, were boiling.
Year 2, the ex-RB noted, is when things got “nasty.” Owens wanted more of his money guaranteed, president Joe Banner refused to budge and the wide receiver took his insubordination to the field. Reid threw him out of training camp at Lehigh University. That’s when the shirtless Owens held a press conference in his driveway while doing situps.
Westbrook still remembers catching the interview on TV. (“He’s ripped. It looks great. But the question for us is like, ‘How do we stay together as a team?’”)
This was McNabb’s team. That didn’t sit well with him.
McNabb was also stumping for Westbrook to be paid without saying a word about his receiver. That really didn’t sit well with him.
As a result, Owens vocalized his angst, gained followers and Westbrook watched the locker room fracture “little by little by little.”
“So it changed very quickly to the point where they weren’t even talking,” Westbrook said. “The two best players on your team weren’t having conversations with each other. And as a third guy on offense, I felt like we could be special. We could be on a different level, but we’ve got to talk. One of my biggest regrets was that I never was able to bring TO, who’s a good friend, and Donovan, a good friend, together. Because I knew we could have been special as a team for a very long time.”
McNabb and Owens walked right by each other without speaking.
“It was tension. Just imagine a workplace with this tension. And not tension from your 52nd or 53rd player, but a tension between Player 1 and Player 2. That’s a problem. And anything that happens in the locker room, that continues to vibrate through that locker room every single day. And it did.”
The running back was only 25 years old. Too young to moonlight as a marriage counselor. He wishes the interpersonal skills he possesses now were in him back then.
He tried. One day, Westbrook made the two players sit with him for lunch.
“And those jokers sat there and didn’t say a word to each other the entire lunch.”
Westbrook later summarized the demise of this relationship with one word: “Sad.”
The 2025 Eagles sure brought memories back to his 2005 Eagles, too. The Jalen Hurts-AJ Brown hostility, to him, represented the same level of distraction.
Again, it’s different when the players squabbling are two of the best on the roster.
Teammates feel as if they’ve got to make a choice — Do I side with Brown? Do I side with Hurts? — and the offense splits into two camps.
Westbrook can see a scenario in which Brown vents to 5 to 10 people. Then, this group tells 5 to 10 more. Then, Hurts pushes back with his own thoughts.
Then, it’s gameday and the quarterback suddenly must work with his wide receiver in harmony. Not easy.
“Now, at the most important time,” Westbrook says, “that I need you the most — not that guys will not hustle because it’s their job. But there’s a little bit extra that you could do that it doesn’t look like you’re doing. Because you’re not in line. And for my boy, I would bend over backwards. But with somebody I don’t really like that well? Even if we work together? Maybe I won’t bend over backwards. I’ll bend a little bit, but not all the way over backwards. And so those little small things make a difference. And what I saw — and I truly believe this — I think that AJ wanted Jalen to throw the ball to him a lot more. I think that Jalen wanted AJ to be more open, quite honestly. I think there were times where he wasn’t very much open.
“And it sounds like they had some off-the-field things that were causing some issues. And when you combine that with us not seeing eye to eye on the football field, that can present some huge problems.”
A fantastic point. It’s easy to dismiss the idea of “drama” as nothing.
Football players, however, are not robots. If two of the best players can’t stand each other — on any team — it’ll manifest into something on Sunday. Westbrook lived this. It’s why he believes teams must be extremely careful in how they build a roster. GM Brandon Beane once described his job as the ultimate “chemistry experiment.” There are countless factors to consider. If one element’s off, the test tubes will combust. It’s no coincidence he used this term to us two months after trading Stefon Diggs.
Removing Brown from the lineup does not help the Eagles on paper.
Teams do not let top 10 to 15 receivers leave the building.
Unless that receiver is a “headache,” Westbrook added, or a “conflict.” A locker room consists of 53 players with 53 different personalities. Plenty are happy to be on the team and won’t say a peep. Stars have the ability to say anything they’d like. With the Patriots, a fresh start, Brown could be the WR1 who unlocks even more out of Drake Maye.
Talent is worth all headaches, all conflicts… to a point. Production equals tolerance.
“In both cases,” Westbrook said, “TO and AJ, as talented as these guys are — the best in the league — it just didn’t outweigh everything we’re trying to build as a football team.”
Which brings us to the next gigantic pull of the slot machine: George Pickens.
He was also traded away by a team, the Pittsburgh Steelers.
He’s now due a hefty contract extension of his own.
Give it up to Pickens. He’s doing everything right. Life inside of Jerry’s World has been remarkably calm with Pickens quietly signing his $27.3M franchise tag and showing up for mandatory minicamp. He’s even joining quarterback Dak Prescott at a skills retreat and plans on attending training camp despite not receiving a long-term extension. Eleven wide receivers now make north of $30M/year with both Ja’Marr Chase and Jaxon Smith-Njigba exceeding $40M/year. Two years ago, Dallas locked up CeeDee Lamb at four years, $136 million.
For stretches of last season, the 6-foot-3, 200-pound Pickens was unstoppable.
Like Aiyuk in ’23, Pickens had every financial reason to produce in ’25 after getting shipped away by the Pittsburgh Steelers. He responded with a 93-catch, 1,429-yard, nine-touchdown campaign. He’s only 25 years old. His best years may still be ahead of him.
Dallas must decide whether he’s built to last or if last season was fool’s gold.
The talent is unmistakable. In Pittsburgh, both the quarterback play and offensive playcalling was amongst the NFL’s worst. In Dallas — with Dak Prescott at the trigger and Lamb drawing attention — his ultra-rare athleticism was finally on full display last season. Pickens was a human highlight reel, from dusting and Moss’ing Cooper DeJean in a wild 24-21 comeback win over Philadelphia to a massive third-and-8 catch and sprint and leap vs. Kansas City on Turkey Day. This is alien stuff. Multiple times last season, it was fair to wonder if George Pickens was the best wideout in football.
But one thing the NFL’s official YouTube channel does not mash up is missed blocks.
Not everyone is sold.
One wide receivers coach who has worked with some of the best in the game the last decade acknowledges that Pickens is capable of taking over a game, but said he’d never want to coach Pickens from what he’s seen and what he’s heard. He labels him a “coach killer” who’ll get you fired.
“There’s a fine line,” this coach said. “You do need talented players, you need guys that have some shit that are going to toe the line, but there’s a lot of receivers that march to their own beat. George Pickens is one of them. Again, you don’t trade George Pickens or DK Metcalf. Those are Hall of Fame-type talents. You don’t just trade those guys unless you feel like you can’t get through to them or they’re just so stuck in their ways that they won’t change.”
This coach expects Pickens to ask for at least $38 million per year and cannot fathom committing that much money.
“Because I know what the tape has shown me,” this coach said. “He doesn’t block. He shows up late to functions. He’s somebody that you’ve got to constantly monitor. I wouldn’t want to put up with that headache.”
A lot of receivers don’t block. That’s not news.
This coach sees an extreme level of apathy. A 44-30 loss to Detroit put much of this on primetime display. Hall of Fame corner Richard Sherman called Pickens “uninterested” and “disengaged” in the loss.
“He will literally walk or won’t even do anything on a run play,” he said. “And then his player will end up making a tackle on the ball-carrier. His wild plays are going to be wild. But his bad plays literally can lose you a game. His field awareness is really good when he’s catching the ball, but any time he has the ball, I always think he’s going to fumble. That’s how bad it is. You fear for your coaching life when he’s out there.”
Dying for a ring, at 83 years old, it’s highly doubtful that Jerry Jones is psychoanalyzing his locker room. He was the man who welcomed Terrell Owens with open arms after the Philly fiasco. Time is a flat circle.
And, hey, let’s remember, Philly reached a Super Bowl and Dallas went 13-3 with Owens. In ‘07, TO was named a first-team All Pro for the fifth time. The risk was worth it.
Philly won it all with Brown.
Look at the Bills’ record books and you’ll see Diggs’ name everywhere.
The wacky case of Brandon Aiyuk more so magnifies the fact that even the sport’s greatest minds struggle with this matrix — where’s the line? At which point is the baggage too much? When do you cut bait? If anyone should’ve mastered it by now, it’s the man who grew up on the sideline of a Super Bowl champion. Shanahan has seen it all from his Dad’s back-to-back champs in Denver as an 18-year-old on the sideline to being a coach himself with the Buccaneers, Texans, Redskins, Browns, Falcons and Niners.
If Shanahan, certified football genius, can botch a character assessment in such epic fashion, anyone can.
The price tag for elite wide receivers only soars. It’s on the teams to know how players will react to that monstrous second contract because, to repeat, they are not androids. One man’s motivation is not the same as the next. This can be money well spent. Some receivers respond like Amon-Ra St. Brown. They continue to catch 606 balls at the JUGS machine each week. Some are like Justin Jefferson. They barely say a peep as another J.J. McCarthy pass quacks into the ninth row.
Others quiet-quit. They stop working as hard in the offseason. They half-ass blocking.
Others, like Aiyuk, leave $27,000,000 on the table in a single year.
The NFL is a human game. Money, one ex-49ers coach added, can be a “drug.”
“Because when you get so much of it, you do think you’re untouchable,” he said. “You think it’s always going to be there. I just can’t imagine him turning down all that money.”
He catches himself.
“I mean, he did. I don’t have to imagine it. He did it.”
Excellent work! You've a future as the top writer on ESPN or wherever you wish.
If Jerry Jones is "dying for a ring", he should consider doing what the other 31 teams have done and hire a GM...