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: What is your biggest takeaway from Kevin Colbert’s press conference yesterday?
The 2019 NFL Scouting Combine is officially underway now, which means that the new league year is just around the corner. It also means that we’ve gotten to hear directly from Steelers General Manager Kevin Colbert in front of the national media, which is really the first major opportunity of the offseason for him to face certain questions.
As you might have guessed, a large portion of the questions that he received yesterday were about wide receiver Antonio Brown—Aditi Kinkhabwala seemed to ask about a dozen of them in a row—but he also talked about a number of topics, including his own ’52 kids’ remark, about the backup quarterback position, James Washington, the running back group, free agency and the Steelers’ own pending free agents, and Head Coach Mike Tomlin’s interpersonal skills.
But I suppose it’s fair to say that the Brown questions were the headliner, after all. Colbert once again reiterated the organization’s official position that they are open but not committed to trading the wide receiver after he officially requested a trade.
One thing of note that he did say was that a trade could happen even in June. Without directly saying so, he is acknowledging that the $2.5 million roster bonus Brown is owed on March 17 will not necessarily serve as a deadline for getting a deal done.
But he also talked about his belief that, should it result in that, Brown could come back into the locker room. He stated that the Steelers still want Brown on the team (and he also denied that there is an excessive amount of drama going on), and that in order to justify removing such a key player from your team, the compensation in return has to match up.
