On Thursday, ESPN’s Mike Greenberg stirred the pot a bit with the Pittsburgh Steelers. During Get Up, he said that he believes that had the Steelers known it would only take a conditional sixth-round pick to trade for QB Justin Fields, they wouldn’t have signed Russell Wilson the week before. That naturally started a bit of a firestorm.
Now, I don’t think Greenberg was trying to say that the cost was so cheap on Fields that they didn’t want to spend the money on Wilson. That interpretation is wrong because neither option is costing the Steelers much at all in 2024. The point that Greenberg was making is that he views Fields as the quarterback the Steelers wanted all along.
That’s not how Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s Ray Fittipaldo sees it.
“I’m sure Omar [Khan] was keeping in touch with [Chicago Bears general manager] Ryan Poles from the end of the season until whenever that deal was made,” Fittipaldo said Friday on the Joe Starker Show on 93.7 The Fan when asked about Greenberg’s comments. “So I can’t imagine that a week or two passed and Ryan Poles said, ‘Okay, it’s a first-round pick and now it’s a sixth-round pick. So to me, I think Russell Wilson was their guy by now… I think the reason Justin Fields is here is because Kenny Pickett wanted out, and once Kenny Pickett wanted out, you needed to get a viable backup in here.”
What Fittipaldo is suggesting is that the Steelers wanted Wilson all along when it became apparent the Denver Broncos were going to release him. Fittipaldo brings up a story about a minority owner of the Steelers wanting Wilson and being the one responsible for brokering the veteran minimum deal. That minority owner is likely Thomas Tull, who is also a business partner of Wilson and his wife Ciara. As a side note, Tull also owns the football that James Harrison intercepted and returned for a touchdown in Super Bowl XLIII.
So Fittipaldo doesn’t believe for one moment that the Steelers would have traded for Fields over signing Pickett. He doesn’t think that the price dropped on Fields that much from right before the Wilson deal to when the Steelers pulled the trigger a week later.
Fittipaldo contends that the only reason they traded for Fields was because they needed a backup for Wilson after they traded Pickett. However, he also said that he’s sure that Khan was doing his homework on Fields from the end of the season. That, to me, doesn’t sound like a general manager wanting Fields only as a backup. There was obviously genuine interest on the Steelers’ end in Fields
This could genuinely be a situation where Khan and the Steelers knew they had to remake the quarterback room in one offseason. So they got the veteran presence they had been lacking since Ben Roethlisberger retired while also getting a young, dynamic athlete who still has potential.
I don’t think the Steelers only brought Fields in because they needed a backup quarterback. They still see him as a potential answer for the future, and The Athletic’s Mark Kaboly could see that happening with time to develop behind Wilson.
Regardless of the timing and the price tags, the Steelers seem to have a plan at quarterback and are doing their best to follow that.
