Now that the Pittsburgh Steelers’ 2023 season is getting underway after the team finished above .500 but failing to make the postseason last year, we turn our attention to the next chapter of Steelers football and everything that entails. One thing that it means is that some stock evaluations are going to start taking on more specific contexts as we get into the season, reflecting more immediate plusses and minus rather than trends over long periods. The nature of the evaluation, whether short-term or long-term, will be noted in the reasoning section below.
Player: ILB Blake Martinez
Stock Value: Purchased
Reasoning: In a short span of time, the Steelers added a pair of veteran starting inside linebackers to serve as depth on a budget. That includes Blake Martinez, a 78-game starter with more than 700 career tackles whose career spiraled downhill to the point he decided to retire last year, stemming from a torn ACL the previous season. Now signed to the 53-man roster off the Carolina Panthers’ practice squad, he will likely begin as a depth option with the possibility of taking on a larger role in the near future.
Blake Martinez was hocking Pokémon cards a short time ago. After tearing his ACL in 2021 and seeing his football prospects tank, he decided to step away from football in late 2022 after finding he could earn more money than he was making at the time by venturing into another of his interests.
Unfortunately for him, things didn’t go exactly as he had planned in that sphere, either. But fortunately for me, it’s not my job to focus on that aspect of his life. For our purposes, all that matters is that those negative outcomes—including lawsuits—presumably pushed him back in the direction of football, and now he’s on the Pittsburgh Steelers’ 53-man roster.
The thing is, Martinez was a pretty darn good linebacker before he tore his ACL in his second season with the New York Giants in 2021, having signed a big-money contract to go there as a free agent from the Green Bay Packers.
New York elected to release him the following offseason, however, and he struggled to find another opportunity while recovering from injury. Eventually, he worked briefly with the Las Vegas Raiders, beginning on their practice squad before participating in four games. And then he retired for the next year or so.
So the question that actually matters for our interests is, what kind of linebacker are the Steelers getting in 2023? And that’s a two-fold question. One is how well he can play, and the other is how much or soon can he play, if at all.
For the moment, he is a veteran insurance policy, and I don’t know that that changes. They have Elandon Roberts, Mykal Walker, and Mark Robinson on the 53-man roster. They also have Myles Jack on the practice squad, and he ran this defense last year before the Steelers let him go as a cap casualty. Will Martinez ever play a down in the Black and Gold? It’s too soon to say. But if he does, here’s hoping he looks closer to his pre-injury form than he did in Las Vegas a year ago.
