During a pregame interview Thursday night on KDKA-TV, Pittsburgh Steelers general manager Kevin Colbert said the organization still hasn’t opened up contract extension talks with any of their key players who are entering their final year under contract.
Colbert, however, didn’t rule out the possibility of a few getting done between now and the start of the regular season.
“At this point we’re just standing with what we got, and we’ll see where things go,” said Colbert.
The Steelers don’t like to talk contracts once the regular season begins so they now have one week left should they decide to extend defensive end Ziggy Hood or wide receiver Emmanuel Sanders.
The first course of action for Colbert and the Steelers coaching staff will be to get the roster trimmed down to 53 active players by later today. Once that is accomplished, they will know exactly where they stand as far as their salary cap situation goes.
Extending Sanders might be tough to do, but Hood, on the other hand, still looks like a good bet. In addition to those two players, both running back Isaac Redman and backup defensive end Al Woods should be able to be extended pretty easily if that is the direction the organization wants to go.
It’s hard to imagine that Colbert won’t get something done with at least one player over the course of the next week, so we will just have to wait and see how it all plays out.
A few years ago, safety Troy Polamalu signed his contract extension at the Pittsburgh International Airport before boarding the team plane to Baltimore to play the Ravens in the season opener, so there is still plenty of time left to get something done with a player or two this year.
Maybe Colbert is just posturing by waiting for the agents to come to him as they all certainly know the Steelers policy when it comes to getting things done by the season opener.
