The Pittsburgh Steelers are roughly three weeks away from opening training camp. While there is some downtime between now and then even for the front office, that’s still plenty of time between now and then—time to get a contract extension done for fourth-year outside linebacker Alex Highsmith.
Will they, though, or won’t they? How much are the Steelers willing to pay him, and how much is Highsmith willing to accept? While there is precedent for the team paying two edge rushers, there has to be a cap on how high it can go for him relative to T.J. Watt—which could prolong negotiations.
And if that extends into training camp, you have to wonder whether Highsmith will be on the field participating in team drills, the “hold-in” that has become prevalent since the last CBA for players in the process of negotiating new contracts. While Ray Fittipaldo of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette isn’t confident he would actually do that, he has nothing against it.
“I wouldn’t have a problem if he did that. He’s protecting himself in a contract year”, he said on 93.7 The Fan on the Poni and Mueller program. He brought up Watt’s own hold-in season of 2021, which ended with a Defensive Player of the Year Award.
“I wouldn’t have a problem with that. And honestly, that might be the best thing for Alex Highsmith and for the Steelers”, he added, “because if he was practicing or if he was practicing in preseason games and he did get injured, then there might be some hard feelings on the player’s side that he got hurt without a contract”.
Players are now prohibitively fined for skipping training camp practices if they are already under contract, enough where actually seeing a genuine holdout has become virtually non-existent. But player can still show up and go through all the meetings and virtually everything right up to the point of actually participating in team practices.
While Highsmith has said quite a number of things about his contract status this year that suggest he’s not looking to rock the boat, one thing he never said definitively is that he wouldn’t hold in if it came down to that.
And that’s fair. It’s a part of the process that everybody understands, and I agree with Fittipaldo when he says that there is good in it for both sides. When you’re dealing with a player who is in a contract negotiation, you’re working with somebody who has great talent and knows your team well. And he’s in the meetings and everything else. He’s not really falling behind.
