The Pittsburgh Steelers still have a few spots open on their 90-man roster, signing few college free agents, but using one spot on CB Beanie Bishop Jr. We still don’t know what signing bonus they gave him, but you only need to hear them talk about him.
They clearly viewed him as a draftable player and may have done so if they had a seventh-round pick. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons that Bishop wound up in Pittsburgh. “I felt like it was a mutual respect thing”, he said about his pre-draft relationship with the Steelers.
“I felt that I would fit in here with their culture, and they feel that I am a guy that fits in, too, so I feel that it’s a perfect match”, he added, via Chris Adamski of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. “They need a slot, and they feel that I can play in the slot, so I just feel that it’s been a perfect match”.
Bishop is only 5-9, 182 pounds, so the slot is about the only place he can play. You’re not going to find many outside cornerbacks at that size lining up in the NFL, not today. And the Steelers clearly prefer their boundary defenders north of six feet.
But the Steelers do need a slot defender, last year’s options currently gone. Chandon Sullivan remains unsigned, for example, and Patrick Peterson as well. I’m not even quite sure who would start there if the season began today. Are we talking about Darius Rush and Damontae Kazee, or Josiah Scott and Thomas Graham Jr.?
Even still, it’s hard to expect a rookie college free agent to start right away. But I’m not sure Beanie Bishop Jr. has a ton of competition. What he does have is speed compared to their past slot defenders. He is considerably faster than Sullivan, Arthur Maulet, and Mike Hilton, for example, with true 4.4 speed. The fastest of that group was actually Hilton’s 4.55 at his Mississippi Pro Day.
Bishop is also older, already 24, so one would hope he has more maturity than the average rookie. He’s not growing into his body and is probably further along life’s path. And it doesn’t hurt that he had four interceptions and a ton of passes defensed last year.
Now, there’s obviously a reason that teams didn’t draft Bishop, being only 5-9 an obvious part of it. The Steelers aren’t fooling themselves thinking they got a guaranteed starter here. Like Hilton before him, he knows his first path to playing time is via special teams.
Nevertheless, there is something to this, I think. The Steelers have a glaring hole at slot cornerback, and I think they believe Beanie Bishop Jr. could fill it. That’s one of the reasons I’m curious how much they gave him in a signing bonus.
