The Pittsburgh Steelers are out of Latrobe and back at the UPMC Rooney Sports Complex, also referred to as the South Side Facility. We are already into the regular season, where everything is magnified and, you know, actually counts. The team is working through the highs and lows and dramas that go through a typical Steelers season.
How are the rookies performing? What about the players that the team signed in free agency? Who is missing time with injuries, and when are they going to be back? What are the coaches saying about what they are going to do this season that might be different from how it was a year ago?
These are the sorts of questions among many others that we have been exploring on a daily basis and will continue to do so. Football has become a year-round pastime and there is always a question to be asked, though there is rarely a concrete answer, as I’ve learned in my years of doing this.
Question: Will Ramon Foster remain with the Steelers in 2019, and if so, for how many years will he sign?
Though he hasn’t gotten the opportunity to add a Super Bowl or a Pro Bowl to his resume yet, Ramon Foster is indisputably a success story as a former undrafted free agent. Coming out of college through the 2009 draft, Foster has now spent a decade in Pittsburgh, and he knows he still has more playing days ahead of him.
The only variable is where those days will be spent, and we already know the background behind that because it’s something that we’ve discussed here on multiple occasions. Though a consistently solid starter, Foster has never separated himself with distinctly flashy performances that would gain attention, and thus accolades.
That is one of the reasons that the Steelers have also been able to consistently retain him at very affordable rates as a stable starting left guard since the back half of the 2012 season, but he would understandably like to be paid more, better reflective of his market value, and is considering actually taking his value to the market this time.
Foster has signed two three-year contracts with the Steelers, and both times he did so, it came prior to the start of the new league year, and thus prior to the start of free agency, though the first one did come within the three-day ‘tampering’ window in which his agent would have been allowed to field calls from other teams.
Foster has already said that the team has expressed interest in retaining him. Will the two sides reach a mutual understanding that keeps him in Pittsburgh? And what will that contract look like? At 33, it’s certainly not going to be very long, but could it be as short as just a one-year deal?
