The scale on which the Pittsburgh Steelers remade their quarterback room without using a first-round pick is quite staggering. However, how they remade the room leaves them in a bit of a future bind. The three veteran quarterbacks the Steelers brought in (Russell Wilson, Justin Fields, and Kyle Allen) are all on one-year contracts.
The Steelers are banking that one of Wilson and Fields will prove themselves worthy of a longer-term contract with their play. People wondered if the team would negotiate a deal with either quarterback before the season kicked off. After all, the Steelers are notorious for not negotiating contracts during the season.
“We’re focused on this year, and we’ll see how things shake out,” Steelers general manager Omar Khan said Thursday at training camp per video from the team’s YouTube channel. “We understand that we got three quarterbacks on one-year deals. That’s this position we’re in, but we’re excited about the guys that we have. So we will address those after the season.”
If you were expecting contract news with either Fields or Wilson this summer or even during the season, it sounds like Khan and the Steelers are content to wait until after the dust settles on 2024. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s Gerry Dulac previously reported that the team wouldn’t seek extensions for either quarterback prior to the season. And Khan’s thoughts seem to be official confirmation of that report.
On one hand, it makes complete sense for the Steelers. They have minimal investment in the quarterback room. If everyone falls flat on their respective faces, the Steelers aren’t locked into bad contracts going forward. That means they can attack the position with plenty of resources ahead of 2025.
And it’s not exactly likely that either Wilson or Fields will perform so well that their contract demands will be so prohibitive the Steelers can’t match them. So there may be some risk to not pursuing an extension now.
But that risk is quite small compared to signing either quarterback to an extension and their performance proving they can’t match it. The Steelers don’t have enough data on either Fields or Wilson to make a contract offer right now.
Khan and company figure they will have all the information they need once the 2024 season is over. They’ll be hoping someone steps up as the team’s future at the most important position in all of football.
