With the Pittsburgh Steelers’ 2022 season over, the team finishing above .500 but failing to make the postseason, we have turned our attention to the offseason. One thing that it means is that some stock evaluations are going to start taking on broader contexts, reflecting on a player’s development, either positively or negatively, over the course of the season. Other evaluations will reflect only one immediate event or trend. The nature of the evaluation, whether short-term or long-term, will be noted in the reasoning section below.
Player: LS Christian Kuntz
Stock Value: Down
Reasoning: Despite two consecutive seasons of steady employment, Steelers long snapper Christian Kuntz may not currently possess job security if the Steelers’ wandering eye this offseason is any indication of what they think of his performance.
Christian Kuntz is the only long snapper on the Steelers’ 90-man roster right now. So what could possibly indicate his stock being down? Well, for one thing, it’s the fact that the team has seemed to show significant interest in other long snappers this offseason.
It started during rookie minicamp, when the Steelers brought in former Baltimore Ravens tight end Nick Boyle as a tryout player, attempting to break back into the league at his new position. While he did not sign, he was the start of a string of tryouts at long snapper, including Antonio Ortiz out of the XFL, and most recently Rex Sunahara, who has spent some time on the team’s practice squad and offseason roster before.
As Josh Carney previously noted, Pittsburgh also worked out a string of long snappers in December, which tells me that this is not just a new issue or anything like an injury that Kuntz might be dealing with. Rather, they seem to be in the market to add some competition.
Of course, competition has been the theme of this offseason for the Steelers as the newly formulated front office has endeavored to add quality depth in as many places as they could manage with the resources available to them.
Kuntz, a former linebacker, is not a bad long snapper by any means, but one would imagine that he is replaceable. The Steelers have seemed to indicate that they are open to replacing him if the right opportunity comes along.
I think it’s safe to conjecture at this point that they will be looking to add a second long snapper to the 90-man roster in the coming weeks, one whom they hope will be able to give their incumbent starter a run for his money, which, if he makes the team this year, would amount to $940,000 before taxes. So there’s a lot on the line.
