Super Bowl LVII will be played on Sunday and after the champion of the 2022 season is finally crowned later in the evening, the NFL offseason will officially get underway. The end of next week will also bring us an important day when it comes to one Pittsburgh Steelers player and that’s none other than cornerback Cameron Sutton.
According to former NFL agent Joel Corry of CBS Sports, Sutton’s contract will void five business days after Super Bowl LVII is played. That should mean on Friday of next week that Sutton will then officially be set to become an unrestricted free agent at the start of the new league year on March 15.
Sutton signed his current contract with the Steelers last March and it totaled out at $9 million for two seasons. That deal included three voidable years being tacked on and that was to help with keeping his 2021 salary cap charge down.
Should the Steelers fail to get something down contractually with Sutton before next Friday when his contract is set to officially void, he will count $2.1 million as dead money in 2023. Obviously, the Steelers can work on re-signing him at any point moving forward and it will be interesting to see if that can be accomplished before next Friday. That seems doubtful, but stranger things have happened before.
Sutton has maintained since the 2022 season ended that he would like to remain in Pittsburgh moving forward if at all possible. Additionally, the team seems very receptive to that happening.
It goes without saying that Sutton is deemed by many to be the Steelers’ highest profile player that’s on course to become an unrestricted free agent in March. Because of that, it’s hard to envision the Steelers not having him re-signed by March 15. We’ll see.
As for what kind of market value Sutton will have this offseason, that’s difficult to gauge. To crack the list of the NFL’s top 15 highest paid cornerbacks as it currently sits, Sutton’s new money average would need to exceed $13,333,333. To crack just the top 20, it would need to exceed $10 million. Because of that, and because Sutton is regarded by many NFL analysts to be one of the top three potential unrestricted free agent cornerbacks this offseason, it’s not hard to speculate his market value being somewhere in between a range of $10 to $13.5 million. Obviously, the amount of guaranteed money will play into negotiations with the Steelers as well.
In the last two seasons, Sutton has played in 32 total regular season games on his way to registering 95 total tackles, with five of those for a loss. He also had five interceptions over the last two seasons, one forced fumble and 21 total passes defensed.
