In less than one week from today, the Pittsburgh Steelers will need to be under the $133 million cap number for 2014 and thus a few extensions, restructures and terminations will take place during the next several days. According to a Tuesday report on Twitter by Adam Schefter of ESPN, safety Troy Polamalu will not be one of those terminations.
Schefter goes on to say that the Rooney family is too loyal to Polamalu and that the former first-round draft has been too valuable to the team.
None of this is really earth shattering news as team president Art Rooney II said in a January conference call with season ticket holders that he wanted Polamalu to retire a Steeler and that the team would look at different ways during the offseason to deal with the structure of his current deal.
“We would very much love to have Troy retire as a Steeler and expect that he will,” said Rooney during that call. “As you probably know, he has a contract for next season, so how we structure or restructure is something we’ll look at in the next few months. As we try to piece together next year and our salary cap, there are a lot of pieces to the puzzle, but I certainly expect Troy will be one of the pieces of that puzzle.
“The great thing about this past season as far as Troy was concerned was that he played all 16 games. That’s very helpful for us when we have a player like Troy who’s able to stay healthy and play start to finish. He’s obviously been one of the great Steelers of all time.”
At that time, it was easy to see that something was going to be done contractually with Polamalu, who is currently scheduled to earn a base salary in 2014 of $8.25 million and count $10,887,500 against the salary cap. For a few weeks now, the two sides have been rumored to be working on an extension that will result in a lower cap number in 2014 and ensure that he finishes his career in Pittsburgh.
An extension for Polamalu will likely consist of a good chunk of his 2014 base salary, along with potentially more new money, to be turned into a signing bonus and prorated out over the length of the contract.
