The Pittsburgh Steelers’ 2021 season is over, already eliminated from the postseason after suffering a 42-21 loss at the hands of Patrick Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs. They just barely made the postseason with a 9-7-1 record and a little help from their friends.
This is an offseason of major change, with the retirement of Ben Roethlisberger, the possible retirement of general manager Kevin Colbert, and the decisions about the futures of many important players to be made, such as Joe Haden, Stephon Tuitt, JuJu Smith-Schuster, and others.
Aside from exploring their options at the quarterback position, the top global priority, once again, figures to be addressing the offensive line, which they did not do quite adequately enough a year ago. Dan Moore Jr. looks like he may have a future as a full-time starter, but Kendrick Green was clearly not ready. Chukwuma Okorafor is heading into free agency, as is Trai Turner.
These are the sorts of topics 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. There is rarely a concrete answer, but this is your venue for exploring the topics we present through all their uncertainty.
Question: Who would be the bigger loss for the Steelers’ front office: Brandon Hunt or Omar Khan?
With uncertainty surrounding general manager Kevin Colbert and his immediate future, the Steelers’ front office has been getting more attention than usual this offseason. There have been reports that Colbert intends to retire, but more recently, they have settled on the idea that he is still deciding whether or not to retire.
Should he decide to, the two leading candidates to replace him would be in-house personnel, those being Omar Khan, who is the Vice President of Football Business & Administration (aka The Cap Guy), and Brandon Hunt, who is the team’s Pro Scouting Coordinator.
Both have been with the organization for a long time. Both have received requests for interviews for general manager roles this offseason, and there remain enough vacancies to go around, at least as of the time of this writing.
The reality is that only one of them can actually replace Colbert, anyway, whether that is this year or in 2023 or 2027. Chances are high that only one of them will remain on board once that transition occurs as the other seeks a general manager opportunity elsewhere.
And so the question is, which of the two would be more harmful to lose? As outsiders, there is only so little we can grasp onto in terms of attempting to answer this question, because we don’t understand the nuances of their job or their influence within the organization.
Still, we can make educated evaluations of our own, for the sake of discussion—a discussion that could reflect the reality of losing one of them, if not both, this offseason. So if you were the Steelers, which of the two—Khan or Hunt—would you be more reluctant to lose, moving forward, especially with an eye toward the general manager chair?
