Buy Or Sell: The Steelers will sign Jaylen Warren, not Najee Harris, to a contract extension this year.
Explanation: After declining Najee Harris’ fifth-year option, he’s now due to hit unrestricted free agency. But Jaylen Warren will also be a restricted free agent in 2025. As a former college free agent, he is permitted to sign an extension after two earned seasons.
Buy:
Back in 2012, the Steelers struggled to negotiate a long-term deal with WR Mike Wallace. Abandoning hope, they signed Antonio Brown, a third-year rising player, to a long but modest extension.
Najee Harris and Jaylen Warren don’t offer anywhere near a perfect parallel, but some of the same principles apply. In this case, I don’t know that the Steelers have any immediate desire to retain Harris beyond this season. From the sounds of it, they want to see how he fits in Arthur Smith’s offense first.
Yet, for the past two seasons, they’ve struggled to find more ways to get Warren on the field. They know, because they’ve seen, that he is the more productive and more versatile back. One might even argue that Warren’s presence influenced their decision to decline Harris’ option.
Extending Warren this offseason won’t cost them a ton, and for Warren, he gets an early payday. That’s always an incentive, the back currently due to earn $985,000 this year. Last year, a second-round restricted free-agent tender was worth roughly $5 million. A first-round tender was worth around $7 million. It makes sense to get something done now because that number only goes up, and they can’t use the right-of-first-refusal tag.
Sell:
If the Steelers need to see how Najee Harris fits in with their new offense, they also have to see the same about Jaylen Warren. He has significantly fewer touches than Harris, and they’ll likely ask him to do a wider variety of things.
And signing players to extensions after two years is extremely rare. They only happen in special circumstances now, like with Alejandro Villanueva, who became a starting left tackle. You don’t sign running backs early if you don’t have to, and the Steelers don’t have to. Not with Harris, and certainly not with Warren.
The bottom line is that they control his rights for the next two seasons. That is, they control his rights, provided somebody doesn’t offer them a first- or second-round draft pick. And let’s be honest, nobody is going to do that. Both Harris and Warren will play out their current contracts, and the Steelers will go from there.
With the Steelers’ 2023 season in the rearview mirror following a disappointing year that came up short in the playoffs once again, it’s time to start asking more questions. Questions about the team’s future in 2024 and beyond. Questions about The Standard.
The rookie class of a year ago was on the whole impressive, but they need to step up into staple starters in 2024. And they likely need a strong influx of talent in both free agency and in the 2024 NFL draft yet again. In addition to a revisitation of the coaching staff.
These sorts of uncertainties are what I will look to address in our Buy or Sell series. In each installment, I will introduce a topic statement and weigh some of the arguments for either buying it (meaning that you agree with it or expect it to be true) or selling it (meaning you disagree with it or expect it to be false).
