More free agency rumors to wet your beak before things officially kick off on March 9th. The Cleveland Plain Dealer’s Mary Kay Cabot reports the Pittsburgh Steelers are one of five teams interested in Cleveland Browns receiver Terrelle Pryor.
Per Cabot:
“Terrelle Pryor is drawing interest from his hometown Steelers, the Giants, 49ers, Titans and Eagles as the free agency two-day negotiating window opens on Tuesday at noon, league sources told cleveland.com.”
Pryor, of course, was born and played at Jeannette High School, a short drive away from Pittsburgh. The team had interest in choosing Pryor in the supplemental draft but at the time, he told them to avoid selecting him. His reasoning, per this 2016 ESPN article from Jeremy Fowler.
“Coming out of the supplemental draft, we talked about them possibly drafting me,” Pryor said of the Steelers. “I just told them, it’s pretty close to home and I play quarterback, I didn’t feel comfortable playing there at quarterback because of all the people I know and people know me. It can get messy. The focus can’t be there. I kind of told them, as much as I wanted to play there, because obviously it’s a great organization, at the same time it probably wouldn’t have worked out because there would have been a lot of focus issues, probably.”
That was several years ago and Pryor has surely grown a lot as a person, making a return to Pittsburgh more likely. There was clearly interest from the Steelers at the time and Pryor is coming off a 1000 yard season.
In her article, Cabot also points out Pryor and Antonio Brown are close friends and they share the same agent, Drew Rosenhaus, who just got a mega-deal done for AB. The Steelers certainly have talent at receiver but Martavis Bryant’s situation is unclear whole Sammie Coates spent the second half of the season trying to pop his fingers back into their sockets.
There is always a lot of smoke around these times and Pryor would seem to cost quite a bit of money. But there are logical connections and he would be an immediate impact player as a clear-cut #2 receiver without the glaring issues Bryant and Coates have.
