There seems to be a prevailing thought that somehow the Steelers need to change the way they do business if they are going to have success moving forward.
The business model put in place by Dan Rooney starting in the late 1960s apparently isn't good enough for some any longer. After all, it's been more than a decade since they last won a Super Bowl.
And the Steelers, apparently, are unchanging in their ways.
But here's the thing, the Steelers have always been adjusting the way they do things, even when Dan Rooney was still team president.
The Steelers have never and likely never will be major players on the free agent market. But they've brought in notable free agents, Kevin Greene, Jeff Hartings and James Farrior among them.
The Steelers don't believe that an NFL team can be built through free agency. They believe the main building blocks for a team has to be acquired through the draft. Free agency can be used to supplement a roster, but it can't be the main building block.
So, those worrying about the Steelers "kicking the can down the road" by pushing some of Ben Roethlisberger's 2021 cap hit into 2022 aren't trusting the process.
The Steelers have more than $170 million in available salary cap space in 2022. Pushing some of Roethlisberger's salary into 2022 was part of the team's plan all along when the organization decided to restructure his contract last spring to create cap space for the 2020 season.
The Steelers never had any intent of allowing Roethlisberger's cap hit in 2021 to be $41.25 million. The plan was to extend him to lessen that cap hit, and they'll likely do that by at least $12 million.
It's not like they'r going to go on a free agent bender in 2022. They'll resign their own impending free agents and maybe supplement their roster with an outside player or two. But it won't be 10.
That's not going to suddenly change. That's a core belief of the franchise.
What has changed in recent years is how aggressive the team has been with draft picks.
Again, there seems to be a feeling in some circles the Steelers have been unbending in their ways. But in the past three years, we've seen them send multiple picks to move up and select Devin Bush in the draft in 2018. We've also seen them send a future first-round pick to acquire Minkah Fitzpatrick.
That's not a team that's playing it safe. It was a difficult decision for Art Rooney II to go against years of precedent. And it certainly shows a willingness to think outside the box when it comes to team building.
When the Steelers traded a future first-round pick for Fitzpatrick, it was something they hadn't done since the 1960s, when the team made a habit of trading future draft picks for players.
It was something Dan Rooney learned after watching the Steelers mortgage their future time after time in the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s. From 1958 through 1967, the Steelers did not have a first-round draft pick six times, having traded them away for veteran players.
It got them four winning records in that 10-year span, but it didn't produce a single first-place finish, which in those days was the only way you made the postseason.
It wasn't until the Steelers stopped trading away their future first-round picks that they started to build a consistent winner. And that is and always will be the plan.
The Steelers want to compete for a championship every year. Part of competing for a championship is first making the playoffs. And if you make the postseason, you are, indeed, competing for the championship.
"We're going to try and build a championship team to go into next year," Art Rooney said last week. "Whether we can do that or not remains to be seen, but we're not going to sit here and say, 'Okay, we're three years away.' We're just not going to look at it that way. We're going to put the best team on the field that we can next year and do our best to compete to, number one, win that division and move on."
The Steelers did that in 2020. They fell short of that goal. They'll try again in 2021. It's what they do.
There are no "rebuilding plans." They won't trade Fitzpatrick or T.J. Watt or Cam Heyward or any of their other stars for future draft picks or to help them acquire a veteran quarterback. They aren't interested in having a few down years to rebuild their roster.
They try to win each year and make their roster better while doing so.
Obviously, it doesn't always work out. Only one team gets to raise the Lombardi Trophy each year. And each year is viewed differently on its own merit.
Whether you believe it or not, the Steelers have a plan. And they'll stick with it.
Doesn't mean it's always the right plan, but it's a definitive plan.
They don't overreact to anything and make knee-jerk decisions. It's always about the big picture. That's why, year in and year out, this franchise is a contender.
Since the Steelers last won a Super Bowl at the end of the 2008 season, nine other franchises have won a championship, with the Patriots the only team to do it more than once. Compare that to the period after the Steelers won the Super Bowl at the end of the 1979 season. In the next 12 years after that, only six teams won the championship.
So it's not like anyone other than New England has had sustained success during that period. Sure, the Chiefs could change that next Sunday, but they haven't done it yet.
In the free agent era, things can change quickly. Teams don't stay the same. And neither will the Steelers. Or the Ravens. Or the Browns.
But history shows the Steelers deserve the trust to get their current roster-building situation right as much as, if not more than, many of the other teams around the league.