The Green Bay Packers will welcome Georgia wide receiver George Pickens to Lambeau Field for an official pre-draft visit this week, per Bill Huber of SI.com.
Pickens, a prized recruit, caught 90 passes for 1,347 yards and 14 touchdowns over 26 games. He broke out as a true freshman, catching 49 passes for 727 yards and a team-high eight scores. In 2020, he led the team in touchdown catches for a second-straight season with six scores over eight games. A torn ACL suffered before his junior campaign limited him to just four games in 2021.
Pickens (6-3, 195) ran the 40-yard dash in 4.45 seconds, hit 33″ in the vertical leap and covered 10-5 in the broad jump. He has smaller hands at 8 3/4″. While he didn’t complete agility drills at the combine, his Relative Athletic Score is 9.33 out of 10.
Pickens is still only 21 years old.
From Lance Zierlien of NFL.com: “Pickens possesses borderline elite ball skills with in-air adjustments, strong hands and an enormous catch radius…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.”
Pickens has an appealing combination of size, athleticism, physicality and early-career production, especially for a team like the Packers. He could be picked at any point between the second half of the first round and into the second round, giving general manager Brian Gutekunst several opportunities to get him to Green Bay later this month.
The Packers appear to be doing extensive work on the receiver class. Treylon Burks of Arkansas and Tyquan Thornton of Baylor have already visited the Packers.