The Pittsburgh Steelers really aren’t in too bad of shape from a salary cap standpoint heading into the offseason, but there is still a lot of work to be done nonetheless. Team president Art Rooney II was a guest Thursday morning on DVE Radio and he talked a little bit about what needs to be done prior to the start of the free agency signing period in March.
“Every year it’s a challenge and this is no exception,” said Rooney. “We’ll have some decisions to make and will probably have to restructure contracts and things like that. I think it’s something that we’ve done in the past, we’ll have to do it again.”
In one of my most recent post on the 2014 salary cap situation, I again speculated that the contracts of wide receiver Antonio Brown and linebacker Lawrence Timmons would be restructured in an effort to free up cap space. Restructures for just those two players alone will free up nearly $8 million in 2014 cap space if done to the full amounts. It’s going to happen.
The Steelers have 21 players on their season-ending roster that will be unrestricted free agents in March and Rooney commented somewhat on the game plan associated with a few of them moving forward.
“No doubt there a quite a number of free agents that we want to be talking to and hopefully get some of them done even before the new league year starts,” he said.
The most obvious unrestricted free agent is linebacker Jason Worilds and their best chance of keeping him in Pittsburgh includes preventing him from hitting free agency. In addition to Worilds, you would have to think that defensive end Ziggy Hood, wide receiver Jerricho Cotchery and defensive lineman Al Woods won’t be far behind when you talk about players that might get re-signed prior to the start of free agency.
Rooney isn’t going to talk about individual players in any of these offseason interviews that he gives this week, but at least he gave a pretty good rough outline of how things will go down over the course of the next 60 days.
