The regular season marks the culmination of an extensive investigation into who your team will be that year. By this point, you’ve gone through free agency, the draft, training camp, and the preseason. You feel good in your decisions insofar as you can create clarity without having played meaningful games. But there are still plenty of uncertainties that remain, whether at the start of the regular season or the end, and new ones continually develop over time.
That is what I will look to address in our Buy or Sell series. In each installment, I will introduce a topic statement and weigh some of the arguments for either buying it (meaning that you agree with it or expect it to be true) or selling it (meaning you disagree with it or expect it to be false).
The range of topics will be intentionally wide, from the general to the specific, from the immediate to that in the far future. And as we all tend to have an opinion on just about everything, I invite you to share your own each morning on the topic statement of the day.
Topic Statement: Melvin Ingram will be traded.
Explanation: There has been heavy speculative reporting indicating that Ingram, the former Pro Bowl pass rusher, is not happy with his role, and that teams have been calling the Steelers about him. And that the Steelers have been listening. The trade deadline is Tuesday at 4 p.m.
Buy:
It’s not fun being at the mercy of speculative reports, but it is telling that Melvin Ingram suddenly came down with a groin injury during the bye week and didn’t even travel with the team. They didn’t travel very far, just to Cleveland, after all.
Ingram is a talented player, and he has played well for the Steelers, so it’s no surprise that there is a market. There are inevitably teams in need of pass rush help, and Pittsburgh’s reputation for that aspect won’t hurt their market.
The third part of the equation is the number three edge rusher. If Ingram is moved, then they can promote Taco Charlton to the 53-man roster. While Charlton is no Ingram, he is a former first-round talent with some abilities. He made his 2021 debut yesterday and didn’t look out of place.
Sell:
Given that most of Ingram’s contract came in the form of unrecoverable bonuses, there isn’t much for the Steelers to gain from moving him, and certainly nothing that would even approximate the value that he brings as a rotational end and as depth.
And the chances of a team offering the Steelers something substantial for a 32-year-old rush rusher for half a season are not very high. Ingram may be disgruntled, but he’ll have to get over it. He’s certainly not going to help his free agent market next year by going the insubordination route, which may even result in him getting benched if he really decides to become a problem.
