Will the Pittsburgh Steelers cave and ultimately give wide receiver Antonio Brown a new contract prior to the start of the regular season? If you listened to general manager Kevin Colbert talk about Brown’s contract Friday morning on Steelers Nation Radio, you can easily come to the conclusion that Brown won’t get new deal this year.
“We’ll never talk about an individual player or contract,” said Colbert, when asked if the team will do anything at all with Brown’s contract between now and the start of the regular season. “Concepts – renegotiate contracts with less than one year are remaining, except for quarterbacks and even in Ben’s case, we waited to a year before it was up. So, Antonio is under contract, he’s a great player, you can’t say enough good things about him, but he’s a professional and he respects the process, as do we, and we’ll see where things end up.”
In no way should anyone be surprised by Colbert’s comments as this has been his stance for quite a while now when asked about whether or not Brown will get a new deal. While Colbert didn’t say it, there is a probably a good chance the team will pay him forward some of his 2017 money this year just like they did late last August. We’ll see.
As things stand right now, Brown is scheduled to earn $6.25 million in 2016 and $8.71 million in 2017, the final year of his current contract.
Being as Colbert has taken such a hard stance on this topic for a year now, it really will be surprising to see him ultimately cave and give Brown a new contract. As for Brown, there has been no indication that he will walk out of training camp even though it was reported a few days ago that he’s hoping to get a new deal between now and the start of the regular season.
