The Pittsburgh Steelers reportedly agreed to sign Russell Wilson last Sunday night, a development that was as shocking to fans as it apparently was to the team. During an appearance on The Rich Eisen Show, Gerry Dulac of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette said that on Sunday night, the Steelers had resigned themselves to moving forward without Wilson.
“Sunday night, they thought that any deal with Russell Wilson was done, was over. And then things changed in the next couple hours, and that’s why at 11:45 p.m. Sunday night, they agreed to the deal with Russell Wilson,” Dulac said. “So they didn’t think it was gonna happen.”
Wilson visited Pittsburgh on March 8 and reportedly had a great meeting, but he had also visited the New York Giants and was rumored to potentially take other visits, including with the Las Vegas Raiders. But it seems as if after meeting with Pittsburgh and thinking about it, it’s where he decided he wanted to be.
The Steelers must have thought that the time gap from the meeting to Wilson informing the Steelers of his decision to come to Pittsburgh was long enough that he was going to sign somewhere else, and Dulac said the team was talking to Mason Rudolph about re-signing him. Once Wilson agreed to sign, that obviously meant that Rudolph would go elsewhere, and it ended up being the end of Kenny Pickett’s tenure with the Steelers, too.
It’s a little crazy to think about what Pittsburgh’s offseason would look like right now if Wilson had in fact spurned them and gone elsewhere. It’s only been a week since his decision to sign with the Steelers, but the feeling around the team with a Kenny Pickett/Mason Rudolph quarterback competition instead of a Russell Wilson/Justin Fields quarterback room would surely be different. Pittsburgh was able to wait out Wilson, and he reportedly agreed to join the team just ahead of the start of the legal tampering period, the Steelers getting right to work building their roster and quarterback room around Wilson.
There are still a number of holes to fill, and the roster is far from complete, but it looks a lot different now than it did at the end of the 2023 season, and there’s certainly a lot more confidence surrounding the Steelers after adding Wilson and Fields in the last week. Pittsburgh also added Patrick Queen on the defensive side of the ball, and there’s little doubt that the Steelers are serious about competing. With Wilson under center, the Steelers want to win a Super Bowl, and we’ll find out if he’ll be able to rebound and show that he can be a top-10 quarterback again after two years with the Denver Broncos that didn’t go as planned.
