Pittsburgh Steelers wide receivers Donte Moncrief and JuJu Smith-Schuster work on ball handling drills during the first practice day of Organized Team Activities at the UPMC Rooney Sports Complex on May 21, 2019 in Pittsburgh. Barry Reeger | Special to PennLive
PITTSBURGH — Donte Moncrief is on his fourth offensive coordinator in six years. His receivers coach is in his sixteenth season in the NFL.
Daryl Drake has seen free agent signings, like Moncrief, come into what is to them a new offense, like Randy Fichtner’s, and struggle to separate that system from those of previous coaches. This would complicate Drake’s job, if it were the case.
“There’s times where you get a guy, you bring him in and he’s been in two or three different systems, those systems start running together," Drake said. "But he’s been able to distinguish the differences and go out there and do things that makes my job a lot easier because he has a feel for the position.”
Moncrief, 25, is by far the most experienced wideout in a receiver room led by JuJu Smith-Schuster. They have the collective task of replacing Antonio Brown. It may not work.
Yet in Moncrief the Steelers have –so far – found the prime-rage secondary receiver they lacked in much of the Brown era. Darrius Heyward-Bey was largely a special teams contributor and Justin Hunter hardly dressed for games by the end of his two-year stint as a Steeler.
Pittsburgh cannot afford for that to be the case with Moncrief. The team signed him to a backloaded two-year, $9 million contract in March.
“One thing that he’s doing right now, he’s playing with a lot of confidence,” Drake said. “And Ben has cofnidence in him. So we just got to continue for him to grow and continue for him to do the things that we ask him to do.”