The Pittsburgh Steelers’ 2020 season is now in the books, and it ended in spectacular fashion—though the wrong kind of spectacular—in a dismal postseason defeat at the hands of the Cleveland Browns, sending them into an early offseason mode after going 12-4 in the regular season and winning the AFC North for the first time in three years.
After setting a franchise record by opening the year on an 11-game winning streak, they followed that up by losing three games in a row, going 1-4 in the final five games, with only a 17-point comeback staving off a five-game slide. But all the issues they had in the regular season showed up in the postseason that resulted in their early exit.
The only thing facing them now as they head into 2021 is more questions, and right now, they lack answers. What will Ben Roethlisberger do, and what will they do with him? What will the salary cap look like? How many free agents are they going to lose? Who could they possibly afford to retain? Who might they part ways with—not just on the roster, but also on the coaching staff?
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: How long will Dwayne Haskins’ career in Pittsburgh last?
Every time the Steelers bring in a former first-round pick who didn’t pan out with his former team, there is a divide among fans about how he will either resurrect his career in Pittsburgh or he will simply continue to be a bust.
That’s been no different so far with Dwayne Haskins, their latest first-round project, a 2019 first-round pick at the quarterback position who was waived in his second season, which is rather rare not just for first-round quarterbacks, but first-round picks in general.
Overall, it seems the majority are not holding their breath as far as Haskins is concerned, but there are certainly some who believe that he has the capability of developing into the team’s next franchise quarterback. Of course, you never know who can emerge and from where, or when.
And so the question of the day is this: how long will his career in Pittsburgh last? We’ve gone through this cycle before with other quarterbacks, whether they were first-round picks or not, including Paxton Lynch, Zach Mettenberger, and even very briefly, Tajh Boyd, among many others.
Currently, Ben Roethlisberger, Mason Rudolph, and now Haskins are the only quarterbacks that the Steelers have under contract. Joshua Dobbs is scheduled to be an unrestricted free agent, while the team did not sign Devlin Hodges to a futures deal.
