4 reasons JuJu Smith-Schuster won’t be re-signed after 2020

Negotiations won’t be easy

Much has been said about how bad the Steelers cap situation maybe next season. With the cap potentially lowering and seemingly the best-case scenario being the cap remaining constant, the Steelers will have to make some tough decisions next year. Smith-Schuster may be one of the top priorities next year, but getting a contract hammered out won’t be easy.

For starters, the Steelers likely won’t be able to franchise tag him. This is due to them having to absorb the 16-million-dollar cap hit he will account for on the tag in whole. If the Steelers sign him to a long-term deal, that first-year cap hit won’t be anywhere near that. Even if they tag him and try to sign him, they will still have to carry him at that franchise tag number for some amount of time.

This means a long-term deal will likely need to be hammered out before free agency begins. This is no easy task for a player that will be signed for considerable money. As well, this means the Steelers will have to only give him competitive offers to try and get a deal done quickly. The other option is the Steelers let him test free agency, but with other teams having more cap space, it would likely end in a bidding war that the Steelers can’t keep up with.

The only thing that is aiding the Steelers is the fact that he has made a good bit of money outside of football. That doesn’t mean he will take any sort of a hometown discount, but if the Steelers give him a market value deal he may be content to take it without exploring what he could earn on the open market. That’s flimsy though, and it would be unwise to expect that from him. When you look at the lack of a franchise tag, it seems unlikely the Steelers will get Smith-Schuster to sign before free agency begins.