Player: ILB Tyler Matakevich
Stock Value: Purchased
Reasoning: The Steelers announced the signing of ILB Tyler Matakevich yesterday. Originally drafted by the Steelers, he returns to where he started to fill a special-teams niche. While there are no contract details publicly available, he likely signed a Veteran Salary Benefit deal. Even so, he stands a very good chance of making the 53-man roster, which is familiar territory.
If you had the Steelers signing Tyler Matakevich on your bingo card for the 2024 season, congratulations, and you’re weird. Because quite frankly I didn’t even know that he was a free agent. Now in his ninth season, he is one of the league’s true special-teams aces.
And that is surely why the Steelers brought him back, especially for the 2024 season. With the NFL’s new kickoff rules, they want to have more veteran special teamers available like Matakevich. And if they need a run-stuffer at the goal line, he can do that, too. He is the discount Robert Spillane.
Selected in the seventh round of the 2016 NFL Draft out of Temple, Tyler Matakevich has just 283 defensive snaps to his name. However, he has also logged 2,564 snaps on special teams over the past eight years. That is how he accumulated the majority of his career 132 tackles—and one of his four passes defensed, too. In 2017, he successfully defended a pass on a fake punt against the Minnesota Vikings. It was his equivalent of Spillane’s hit on Derrick Henry, one might say.
Notably, Matakevich found himself in good financial standing after his rookie contract with the Steelers. The Buffalo Bills treated him well, paying him very respectably to serve as a special-teams ace. He spent the past four years there, logging fewer defensive snaps in Buffalo than he did in Pittsburgh. But he still managed 55 tackles in four seasons with the Bills with just 134 defensive snaps versus 1,356. Now 31 years on, Matakevich surely realizes where he is at this point in his career. He probably never signs anything more than a Veteran Salary Benefit deal ever again. But as long as he keeps proving his worth on an annual basis, he can keep finding contracts.
As the season progresses, Steelers players’ stocks rise and fall. The nature of the evaluation differs with the time of year, with in-season considerations being more often short-term. Considerations in the offseason often have broader implications, particularly when players lose their jobs, or the team signs someone. This time of year is full of transactions, whether minor or major.
A bad game, a new contract, an injury, a promotion—any number of things affect a player’s value. Think of it as a stock on the market, based on speculation. You’ll feel better about a player after a good game, or worse after a bad one. Some stock updates are minor, while others are likely to be quite drastic, so bear in mind the degree. I’ll do my best to explain the nature of that in the reasoning section of each column.
