Markus Golden has put up 10-plus sacks in three of the six seasons in which he played in more than 11 games during his eight-year NFL career. He’s not far removed from one of this best seasons to date, recording 11 sacks for the Arizona Cardinals in 2021 at the age of 30. Yet just a year later, despite playing even more, he ended up with just two and a half sacks. What happened?
“Football. Some seasons you come out, you get a lot of sacks, some seasons you come out and you work just as hard as you did the season before and the sacks don’t fall in your hands”, he told reporters this past week, via the team’s website. “That’s what I do it for. That’s why I love the game. It ain’t always gonna go your way, but you’re gonna battle, you’re gonna get back in the lab and work, and that’s what I’m gonna do”.
It would be wise to remind readers at this time that sack numbers are not one of the more stable performance barometers, as they can fluctuate somewhat significantly due to variables outside of the player’s control. It’s entirely possible for a five-sack season to be more impressive on tape than a 12-sack season.
And the reality is that the rest of Golden’s numbers were pretty stable. He actually he one more quarterback hit in 2022, and the same number of tackles. His overall pressures were down, but not to the extent implied by his sack line.
The Steelers signed Golden for just a veteran-minimum deal, accounting for just under $1.1 million against the salary cap in 2023. His cap number is only about $150,000 higher than the lowest salary on the Rule of 51 cutoff right now, so suffice it to say that he came cheap.
That doesn’t mean his play will be. The team believes that he can offer them quality play off the bench, both against the run and the pass, but at 32 years old and coming off a season in which his numbers don’t reflect his play, it’s not a shock that he took a bargain deal.
The Cardinals actually signed him to a nice little one-year extension heading into the 2022 season after he put up his 11-sack year. They opted to release him at the start of this offseason, making him a street free agent.
Now he is Pittsburgh’s number three edge rusher behind T.J. Watt and Alex Highsmith, and one that they hope will be more effective than Malik Reed and more content than Melvin Ingram, neither of whom worked as planned as veteran reserves over the past couple of seasons.
We’ll see this summer how much juice Golden has left in the tank, but the hope is that they won’t need him nearly as much as they needed Reed and others last season. In other words, they’re hoping their starters will have better luck staying healthy this time around, and that Golden’s job instead will be to keep them fresh rather than to spot start in their places.
