Steelers Now
The Pittsburgh Steelers did not make a trade at the trade deadline on Tuesday, with general manager Omar Khan choosing to stand pat — a move that has seemingly upset a lot of Steelers fans that were apparently unaware of what has been happening with the franchise.
So, let’s catch people up.
To start, we need to go back to 2021. The Steelers decided before that season that 2021 would be Ben Roethlisberger’s final year in black and gold, and the 2021 NFL Draft class was supposed to be the beginning of the effort to build a bridge to the next contending Steelers team.
The idea was that the Steelers already had an elite defense, led by T.J. Watt, Cam Heyward, Minkah Fitzpatrick and company — a defense that had just dragged Duck Hodges to the verge of the playoffs and a post-arm-injury Big Ben to a 12-4 record.
With the defense looking solid, the Steelers then planned to rebuild the offense, with the 2021 NFL Draft being the start of that. Najee Harris, Pat Freiermuth, Kendrick Green and Dan Moore were supposed to form the base of an offense that they would later add a quarterback to.
The following season, Big Ben retired and the Steelers followed through on the idea of the previous draft, adding Kenny Pickett, George Pickens and Calvin Austin III to what form what was hoped to be the basis of a future offense.
It was a clear effort at an offensive rebuild. At the same time, the Steelers were not tanking. They had been a good team, even with below average offenses in the recent past. They didn’t need the young unit to be elite right away to be pretty good, they just needed to be good enough.
So the Steelers were still trying to compete, but don’t confuse that with pushing all their chips in.
Under Kevin Colbert in the late stages of Roethlisberger’s career, the Steelers frequently over-spent the cap by restructuring contracts and kicking the can down the road to attempt to eke as many wins out of each season as possible. They also made win-now trades like sending out a first-round pick to Miami for Fitzpatrick. They were unusually active in free agency, almost never receiving comp picks as a result. It was clear the Steelers were making a big push to get Big Ben one more title before he retired.
That all came to a head in 2020-21, when a COVID-reduced salary cap forced the Steelers’ hand, and they lost a couple of players they wanted to keep, most notably Javon Hargrave and JuJu Smith-Schuster. That cap reduction, with the Steelers’ proclivity for overspending at that time, was the death knell of that era.
In the post-Ben years, all of that behavior has stopped. The team has not been overspending the cap. In the past few offseasons, they’ve had carryover cap space, and they’ve done that while leaving potential restructures on the table.
But — [as Roethlisberger himself recently...
