. And the Steelers are one of a handful of teams who know how to effectively manage their roster on a yearly basis.

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If that’s true then why did they have to restructure several contracts this offseason in order just to get under the cap?

They are setting themselves up to put the team into
salary cap hell sometime in the next couple of seasons,
just like what happened years ago to the 49ers & Titans
when they tried to hold onto all their vets in
order to make “one last playoff run” with the old group.

Pittsburgh will stink royally by 2014 & will stay that way
for at least a few seasons, just like the Titans & Niners did.
Bank on it…

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The bottom line is that they probably won’t be able to.

Like it or not, they’ll have to blow this team up sometime
in the next 2 or 3 seasons because they chose to restructure a
bunch of contracts this year in order to get under
the cap without cutting a bunch of overpaid vets.

When it finally happens, they’ll go from a playoff
team to picking early in several drafts in a row…
which will make all us haters very happy!

@tommythek, dexterismyhero, paulbrown46 …

Uh-huh. I’ll start worrying when you guys stop. If the Steelers didn’t get under your skin, you wouldn’t try so hard to get under ours
=================================Wrong Deb. It’s just always this stairwayto7/Lombardis stuff that is funny. sorry for getting under your skin :>)

I’ll start worrying when the Stillers hire another former Brown to coach the team, i.e. Chuck Noll and Bill Cowher.

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Am I missing something? The supposed “dilemma” is that the Steelers are going to have to deal with signing high-potential/highly-talented FA WRs next year, with some suggestion or hint being that this wouldn’t have been an issue (or as much an issue) had Brown and Sanders’ contracts been done differently initially (the four-year, instead of three-year, rookie contract issue is mentioned in conjunction with this). However, had the Steelers signed both Brown and Sanders to four-year contracts initially, then it would have likely only delayed the problem to 2014 instead of 2013. The supposed dilemma’s there either way.

Reading the article, the only “problem” I see as that the Steelers have a young, highly talented receiving corps. That’s something that you have to pay for, and a “dilemma” most teams would be envious of.

22 balls in 11 games is a big deal????

The Steelers let Santonio Holmes, Plaxico Burress, and Antwaan Randle-El go. Weren’t all of them replaced????

Anyway… They’ll resign all 3 of these guys. Thats a smart organization. These are 3 “team” guys. You keep players like that.

==========================

Good question. I think the spirit of the tag is to give teams better odds to keep their star players, so I think they would still have the right to match the deal they signed with another team in order to retain them. BUT – the question I have is Did the new CBA address the past issues with “poison pills” in these types of contracts? If I recall correctly, that was a game the Vikings and Seahawks played with each other several years ago. Steve Hucthinson wound up joining the Vikings because they added a clause that said he had to be the highest paid lineman on the team. Since the Seahawks already were paying big bucks to Floyd Womack, there was no way they could pay a guard the kind of money that a left tackle makes, so they were screwed and lost a good player in his prime that they should probably have been able to keep. I think the Seahawks then signed Nate Burleson away from the Vikings by adding a clause that greatly escalated his base salary if he played more than 3 games in the state of Minnesota. Pretty clever, as there is obviously no way Minnesota could match that. But I haven’t heard anything about whether the fairness in the system was addressed in the last CBA.

Art will figure all this out.

Uh-huh. I’ll start worrying when you guys stop. If the Steelers didn’t get under your skin, you wouldn’t try so hard to get under ours

I sincerely doubt that anyone in the Steelers organization is sitting around thinking, “Dammit, why did we draft all these good players?”

The other team would sign a RFA to an offer sheet that would give the player’s original team the option to either match the contract or receive the pick as compensation. The pick is determined by the size of the one year RFA offer tendered to the player.

Why not? It’s not as if these guys are Andre Johnson, Megatron & Fitzgerald.

Brown is a nice WR, but he hasn’t exactly set the world ablaze yet, and Sanders has done practically nothing so far in his career. Steeler fans need to quit hyperventilating over these guys.

Wallace and Sanders were 3rd rounders and Brown was a 6th. All the Steelers need to do is stick a 1st round RFA on them and they get back more than they invested.

**********

I believe they can still match the contract offer and keep the player. But it’s possible the poaching team could include clauses that make the contract impossible for the original team to match (I think – unless that loophole was closed).

by the way…Ward is done. Even the league veteran minimum is too much to pay him under the cap. They’re just trying to figure how much of the tab they’ll pick up at his retirement party. Its coming.

???

stick to what you know Buddlite (you drink Bud, so it can’t be beer). Sanders has been injury-prone his first 2 years, but Brown and Wallace have been durable.

All teams should be so lucky to have this dilemma: drafting WR’s, or any position, that far outperform their draft position.

At some point good players get paid.