While the Pittsburgh Steelers landed a wide receiver in Mike Williams, not everyone agreed that they got a good deal. Despite buying from a team in a selling mode, they still coughed up a fifth-round pick for a player with 12 catches and no touchdowns on the season. Sure, Williams could step up with the Steelers in the second half of the season.
But the Steelers should have never allowed themselves to be in this position in the first place, says former NFL GM Doug Whaley. Speaking on 93.7 The Fan earlier this week, he went back to the Diontae Johnson trade, which he speculatively characterized as less about football. He is far from the only one to do so, but he believes that it got the Steelers into trouble.
“When you start making personal decisions, they usually come back to bite you,” Whaley said. Reporters widely claimed that the Steelers grew tired of Diontae Johnson. Now, he’s in Baltimore.
While the Steelers may have been glad to rid themselves of a headache, they did not have a hard-and-fast plan to fill Johnson’s shoes. Coincidentally, enough, Mike Williams was the biggest swing they took at a wide receiver in free agency. They signed guys like Van Jefferson and Quez Watkins to Veteran Salary Benefit deals but banked on other means to fill the gap.
“You expose yourself to that possibility when you don’t have that plan in place to replace the guy you left,” Whaley said. “That’s the only misstep I’d say [Steelers GM] Omar [Khan] did this offseason, was not having that plan in place and basically saying, ‘We need a wide receiver.’ So everybody’s like, ‘Alright, well you’re gonna have to overpay.'”
Of course, Mike Williams can prove to be worth more than a fifth-round pick. It’s not as though he doesn’t have a legitimate, established NFL resume. Realistically, if he were not coming off a torn ACL, the Steelers wouldn’t have even been in the mix. But he is coming off a torn ACL, and that has been a factor.
“Ended up getting somebody. Is it to the ilk that everybody thinks that we should have got? No. But right now, with what they had to work with? We’ll see,” Whaley said of the Steelers’ addition of Williams. “Right now, you can’t really question what they’ve said personnel-wise and who they need to put in and who they get. Because they’ve been hitting on more than they’ve missed.”
The Steelers’ 2024 season has been more hits than misses. They have two quarterbacks with winning records and a running back rattling off 100-yard games. T.J. Watt is still T.J. Watt, and the defense as a whole is at a five-year peak. Arguably, the only thing missing was a legitimate No. 2 WR. So if Williams can be that, then perhaps a fifth-round pick wasn’t such a bad price to pay. But time will tell, as it does for all trades.
