Now that the Pittsburgh Steelers have locked up center Maurkice Pouncey with a five-year contract extension, they can now turn their attention to a few other players that they might want to extend prior to the start of the 2014 season.
For starters, as far as salary cap space goes, if the early numbers associated with Pouncey’s new extension hold up to be true, the Steelers actually cleared an additional $263,375 in salary cap space for 2014.
So which player is next up for an extension?
One would think that it would be fourth-year cornerback Cortez Allen.
Being as Allen is set to earn $1.431 million in 2014 and based on the fact that he’s yet to fully establish himself, his price tag shouldn’t be all that high at all. After all, he’s only started 11 games so far during his first three years in the league to the tune of 1341 total defensive snaps.
It’s hard seeing Allen expecting to get more than $2.5 million a season at this point and the guaranteed money associated with a new deal should be very easy to swallow. It will be very surprising if an extension isn’t worked out with him and it shouldn’t eat up a ton of cap space in 2014 when the ink finally dries.
While there’s no guarantees that it will happen, the Steelers should still have plenty of cap space left to work out an extension with quarterback Ben Roethlisberger. Roethlisberger is set to earn a $12.1 million base salary in 2014 and he currently carries a cap charge of $18.895 of which $6.795 million has to stick in a new deal because of past restructuring. An extension for Roethlisberger this offseason could theoretically be worked out without his 2014 cap charge moving any, depending on the signing bonus given and how much of his scheduled base salary is rolled over into a new deal.
Outside of Allen and Roethlisberger, it stands to reason that linebacker Jason Worilds would be the only other player left to consider giving an extension to this offseason. While I’m not convinced that it will happen, if it does, it stands to reason that his current 2014 cap charge of $9.754 million would drop considerably. That freed up cap space then could be rolled over to next season or rolled into first-year guaranteed money for Roethlisberger as part of a new extension for him.
Needless to say, Pouncey’s extension won’t be the last one that we’re talking about prior to the start of the 2014 season. It’s just a matter of how many more extensions at this point.
