The Pittsburgh Steelers are now into the regular season, following the most unique offseason in the NFL since at least World War II. While it didn’t involve a player lockout, teams still did not have physical access to their players, though they were at least able to meet with them virtually.
Even training camp looked much different from the norm, and a big part of that was the fact that there will be no games along the way to prepare for. Their first football game of the year was to be the opener against the New York Giants.
As the season progresses, however, there will be a number of questions that arise on a daily basis, and we will do our best to try to raise attention to them as they come along, in an effort to both point them out and to create discussion
Questions like, how will the players who are in new positions this year going to perform? Will the rookies be able to contribute significantly? How will Ben Roethlisberger look—and the other quarterbacks as well? Now, we even have questions about whether or not players will be in quarantine.
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 the Steelers make a trade before the deadline?
While the Steelers are not trading Cameron Sutton—or trading for Stephon Gilmore, as the baseless rumors suggested on Tuesday night—there is still time before the trade deadline of Tuesday for the team to make a move. And it’s not as though they didn’t just lose their starting mack linebacker.
Of course, Pittsburgh doesn’t have a lot of resources, either in terms of cap space or in future draft picks that they would be in a hurry to give away, but they do have a recent history of acquiring players in-season. Just last year, they traded for Minkah Fitzpatrick, and even Nick Vannett. And they also traded away Joshua Dobbs.
So would it be shocking, just one year after making three in-season trades, that they get one in under the buzzer this year? No, of course not. Am I betting on them making a trade? Absolutely not, either. I would expect that they will stay put, but they will also be exploring their options and making phone calls if anything out there sounds reasonable.
Splitting reps between Robert Spillane, Ulysees Gilbert III, and Cameron Sutton to replace Devin Bush is not what the Steelers were looking forward to doing as they made a title run in 2020, but there are worse alternatives, and upgrading from that solution would not come cheap—or possibly even within their price range.
