The Pittsburgh Steelers came to terms with veteran cornerback Patrick Peterson on Monday, and he’s now set to sign his two-year, $14 million contract likely on Wednesday, the official start of the 2023 NFL league year. The details of Peterson’s contract surfaced late Monday night so with that, I can pass along the Steelers’ updated salary cap situation entering Tuesday.
Peterson, formerly of the Minnesota Vikings, will have 2023 salary cap charge of $4.225 million and that obviously will inject him into the Steelers’ Rule of 51. He’ll displace a cap charge of $870,000 in the process so that means the Steelers effectively used $3.355 million in 2023 salary cap space by signing Peterson.
The Steelers entered Monday with $10,409,318 in available salary cap space. They exited Monday just $7,054,318 under the cap.
The Steelers have yet to announce any restricted free agents tenders so far this offseason. If they are planning to do so, those need to be issued by 4:00 p.m. ET on Wednesday, the start of the 2023 NFL league year. It’s possible that they have already issued those with the news yet to surface. We’ll see and we’ll know for sure by Wednesday evening.
We also still await word on any contract restructures the Steelers may have done, or will do, prior to Wednesday. There’s no deadline for them to do restructures, however. They might decide to wait on those until later in the offseason. Once again, we’ll have to just wait and see.
It will also be interesting to see if the Steelers have any more contract terminations in the coming days. Those could obviously happen at any time and especially after Peterson officially signs his contract.
As of Monday night, the Steelers have lost only one of their scheduled unrestricted free agents to another team and that was cornerback Cameron Sutton, who agreed to sign a three-year, $33 million contract with the Detroit Lions at the start of the new league year.
