Pittsburgh Steelers QB Justin Fields spent 11 games as a healthy backup last season after starting six games. Actually, technically, he did miss a game or two due to injury, but you get the point. The point is that health is not the reason that he didn’t start a game after Week 6.
And yet despite this inconvenient fact, the prevailing belief is that the Steelers prefer Justin Fields over Russell Wilson. It helped his case immensely that the Steelers fell into a five-game skid to end the season, granted. Essentially, they didn’t give Fields the opportunity to play long enough to really screw up.
Justin Fields still has that “what if?” mystique about him, which Mark Kaboly believes will serve him well in negotiations with the Steelers—and with anybody else. Indeed, he argued that if he were Fields’ agent, he would advise him not to sign anything now. At least, not unless it’s a contract that is well above market.
“Why not wait? Worst-case scenario for Justin Fields, he hits the market and probably goes somewhere else for a pretty decent amount of money”, Kaboly said on 93.7 The Fan of the Steelers’ pending free-agent quarterback. “It’s all setting up towards Justin Fields…has all the power. Pretty much anything he wants to do, he can do right now, because [of] the lack of quarterback talent in the draft and in free agency”.
Publicly, the Steelers have been very clear that their preference is to re-sign Justin Fields or Russell Wilson. Even the players, such as Cameron Heyward, prefer to stick with the guys they know.
For obvious reasons, they also want to get something done before the start of free agency. That is right around the corner now, so if they don’t have a signed contract, they expose themselves. And it’s fair to suggest that if the Steelers prefer Russell Wilson over Justin Fields, it is more likely that would have already taken place.
If indeed, Fields is the leader in the Steelers’ clubhouse, the timeline could elongate. As a 26-year-old looking for an unblemished opportunity to start, and to maximize his earnings, he has no compelling reason to sign now. That is, of course, unless he thinks he doesn’t have a market outside of Pittsburgh.
But believe it or not, teams and players’ agents engage in tampering. Unless you’re like Ian Rapoport and think Tom Brady just randomly meets Matthew Stafford on the slopes and hammers out the hypothetical details of a trade—which itself is tampering whether the encounter was incidental or not, but I digress. My point is, Justin Fields already has some idea of what non-Steelers teams might offer him.
And the thing is, he doesn’t even have to tamper, because that information is out there. Reporters who cover the league talk to people from teams and ask them questions. They know that there are teams open to competing with the Steelers to sign Justin Fields. The only question is how hard they’re willing to compete, and what they offer that the Steelers won’t.
