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View Full Version : Gauging Steelers Free Agent Budget



Mojouw
03-06-2018, 09:06 PM
So I was thinking about this after reading through the recent posts in the Bell thread about the franchise tag. Let's just leave that alone for a second. And let us, for the sake of argument, ignore the cap specifics for a moment.

The Steelers have for the entire salary cap era set a "budget" for their roster. They simply refuse to pay guys beyond what they value them at. In addition, they also have never really brought a guy in and had his salary go well above the established leaders on whichever side of the ball we are talking about. And most well run NFL teams do this. You invite locker room problems if you sign Heyward and Tuitt to be the leaders of your defense, and then just give some 28 year old free agent safety $3 million more per year. It is gonna piss people off.

Looking at the contract values on defense you have Tuitt, Heyward, and likely would have had Shazier making between 9-12 million per year. Haden is an oddity that he came in and immediately slotted into that range - a rarity for the Steelers but I suspect Haden's ability, work ethic, track record of success, and visible positive contributions almost instantly smoothed that over. Gotta figure Heyward and Shazier were consulted. So what am I trying to say?

Long story short, Steelers FA budget on defense is likely capped at $8-10 million per year for any given guy. Regardless of salary cap or franchise tag. What does that mean? Well at least for me, it means that Burnett isn't coming here. Trumaine Johnson isn't coming here. Wilkerson and Richardson aren't coming. And they never were.

I think the two "pricey" targets are Bradham (SB champion $$$ bump) and Eric Reid.