Welcome to DK Sports Radio and a new Daily Shot of Steelers, my every-weekday, half-hour program on the local football franchise. Today's episode: Ben Roethlisberger's contract negotiations with management should include a whole bunch of Drew Brees comparison points.
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THE TRANSCRIPT
The Steelers don't exactly have a history of being tough in their negotiations with Ben Roethlisberger. So don't expect anything of the kind to take place this week when they're expected to talk.
But man, they really should be tough this time.
The team's front office needs to follow through on what at least sounded like a semi-tough remark from Art Rooney a couple weeks ago, in which he said that the Steelers can't work with Ben's $41.25 million cap hit. It's going to have to be adjusted. And Art didn't make it sound like it was optional, so I got my hopes up a little bit. I thought, all right, here we go, here's something they could really get that cap number down. And if Ben doesn't like it, that'll be that.
And then Drew Brees, who's made it known tangentially for a while that this was going to be it for him with the Saints, worked out a deal with New Orleans management to reduce his 2021 salary from $25 million all the way down to $1.075 million. That's actually the NFL minimum. And the reason that he did that now -- without getting into all kinds of capology for you here -- is because, in doing so, he'd free up almost $24 million of cap space for the Saints, half of that this coming year and half the following year.
Don't cry for Drew. This wasn't some super crazy magnanimous gesture on his part. He won't be hungry. He'll get all of the money he's owed. The reason I'm bringing it up is that it it sets a pretty nice template here. It sets something the Steelers can take to Ben, even though his situation is different, even though he's obviously not retiring, even though he's due a reporting bonus of $15 million within the next month. But there's enough there that, if I'm Kevin Colbert and Omar Khan, and I'm dealing with Ryan Tollner, Ben's agent, I'm saying to them, 'Hey, this could work for us in some fashion. Because if your client can show up for the Zoom meeting with reporters 10 minutes after a three-interception first quarter against the Cleveland Browns in a playoff game and advocate openly and publicly for JuJu Smith-Schuster to be brought back before he can become a free agent ... well, that's not going to happen just by wishing for it. If he wants to continue benefiting from this all-universe defense that we've got here, we'd really appreciate the flexibility to be able to at least approach Bud Dupree, Mike Hilton and Cam Sutton. If he'd like to have a real live running back, presuming we can't get one in the draft ... if Maurkice Pouncey retires and he'd like to have an offensive line that isn't made up almost entirely of schoolchildren ... we're gonna need some flexibility here.
I can't say this often enough: I'm not wild about any parts of this scenario. There's a piece of me that would love to see Ben come back and do great. And address a lot of the things that, particularly in the second half of this past season, went wrong for him. I think that'd be a ton of fun for everyone to watch, for me to cover, for the Steelers themselves to enjoy and reap all the benefits from ... that'd be great. It'd be a great, great script.
I don't see it, I don't feel it, and I don't find that to be a plausible thing. After everything that we just watched. And as a result, this whole process feels like trying to make the best out of an unwanted or an unwelcome situation. I'd like to keep together this defense. And I'd like to see the offense get rebuilt, in some form, not quite from scratch. Because you'll still have most of those really good young receivers, you'll have some pretty good young parts on that offensive line. And, you know, you'll have another quarterback that like ... even talking like this, it feels like if I do it, it feels like it's disingenuous. You know, like, I'm talking to you about something that I know isn't likely to happen. But you can do both. You can say on one hand what you think will happen, but also which way you're feeling about it.
I'm looking around the NFL right now and, despite the promising start that Ben had to his 2020 season, where he was really efficient -- and remember, a lot of people and I've mentioned it myself were talking about him as a potential MVP candidate if he'd kept it up -- he didn't. And that's because defenses figured out that all he was doing was throwing short, he was taking the safe option 99% of the time. And once they got wise to that and once they started moving everybody up to the line of scrimmage and there was no Plan B, it all went kablooey. No, I don't look at this as think, 'Yeah, this is eminently fixable.'
At the same time, you've got to deal with reality. And reality is that the Steelers have for a very, very long time felt beholden, felt obligated to Ben. And other than Rooney throwing that one little hint out there, there's been scant signs of that changing.