The Steelers are now in their offseason after failing to reach the playoffs in 2022, coming up just a game short of sneaking in as the seventh seed. They needed help in week 18 and only got some of it, so instead they sat home and watched the playoffs with the rest of us.
On tap is figuring out how to be on the field in January and February instead of being a spectator. They started out 2-6, digging a hole that proved too deep to dig out of even if they managed to go 7-2 in the second half of the year.
Starting from the end of the regular season and leading all the way up to the beginning of the 2023 season, there are plenty of questions that need answered, starting with who will be the offensive coordinator. Which free agents will be kept? Who might be let go due to their salary? How might they tackle free agency with this new front office? We’ll try to frame the conversation in relevant ways as long as you stick with us throughout this offseason, as we have for many years.
Question: Have the Steelers addressed all of their pre-draft needs?
While the Steelers sometimes find that the need to plug in some veteran starters, the organization has historically utilized free agency as a means of replenishing depth. Doing so provides some security during the draft against having needs that one feels compelled to address whether it otherwise makes sense to do so.
Turning ‘needs’ into ‘wants’ allows a team to have a much freer draft board, giving them a wider variety of options about how they want to go with each selection, and perhaps even whether or not they feel compelled to move up or down the board.
And so the question is, have the Steelers addressed all of their ‘needs’ heading into the draft, to the point where they won’t feel forced to draft for a particular position at a particular time even if the right prospect isn’t there?
More than perhaps any offseason in recent memory, Pittsburgh has been quite active on the open market, including re-signing their own. They have actually lost a fair amount of players, most of them expendable, some starters who have been replaced by outside veterans.
The first question to address is, is there such an obvious hole in the starting lineup that Pittsburgh will need, no matter how the board breaks, to address that position early? Cornerback and tackle have become the favored positions to address in the first round, but are these positions more ‘needs’ than ‘wants’, with Dan Moore Jr. and Chukwuma Okorafor at tackle, and Patrick Peterson, Levi Wallace, and others at cornerback?
Secondly, are there positions where depth will be a major issue based on what is currently available? The Steelers are still pursuing reinforcements at outside linebacker given the recent visit with Bud Dupree, so that would be one obvious answer even the organization acknowledges.
