The Steelers need to reassess the approach to free agency
I realize that every organization has ‘hits’ and ‘misses’ in both the draft and in free agency. The Steelers; however, have had more ‘misses’ recently than ‘hits’. The repercussions from ‘missing’ on a free agent could set the team back for years to come.
Why is that? Well, if we sign a free agent at a position of need, which is often the case, we may not draft a player at that same position even though that draftable player could be the best player at the position that was just ‘filled’ via free agency.
The fact that the Steelers traded up in this year’s draft to select Bush after signing Bostic to a two-year deal in 2018, then subsequently released Bostic and signed Barron tells me that we tried Bostic out for a year, realized he wasn’t what we expected, drafted Bush, but had to trade future draft picks to get him, and signed Barron because we needed a veteran.
I don’t know about you, but that seems rather convoluted to me. It also seems like the Steelers have been disorganized and unfocused in the recent approach to free agency. As I stated earlier in the conversation, we have never been ‘big players’ in free agency. I like the fact that the Steelers have elected to try to retain our own free agents.
Sometimes; however, you have to ‘go big’ and try to sign a marquee free agent, if for nothing else than to be able to say this: “Hey, we made a good offer and it was accepted or we made a good offer, but it was rejected”. In recent years, the Steelers have very little to show from our free-agent signings. This trend can not continue if we want to be playing meaningful football in January of 2021.