Bleacher Report not a big fan of Pittsburgh Steelers 2022 offseason

Many Steelers fans seemed to like the moves their team made this offseason, but here’s why Bleacher Report doesn’t agree with Pittsburgh’s choices.

You can’t please everybody in this line of business. I have been as hard on the Pittsburgh Steelers as anyone in the past, so I get it. I still don’t agree with some of the high draft choices they have made in recent years or how they’ve dispersed their money in free agency.

However, I don’t have a laundry list of complaints to file with Kevin Colbert in his final offseason as the Steelers general manager. Though I think he hit a bit of a rough patch later in his career, I think he did a pretty good job redeeming himself during the 2022 offseason.

When free agency kicked off, Colbert (as always) was careful not to overspend, but he was able to land quality football players like James Daniels, Levi Wallace, and Myles Jack. In the NFL Draft, I wasn’t a huge fan of the Kenny Pickett selection in round one, but I thought Colbert got excellent value in rounds 2-4.

Sadly, Bleacher Report strongly disagrees. Recently, Christopher Knox of B/R handed out 2022 offseason report cards for every NFL team. This included grades for free agency and the draft as well as an overall grade.

Knox gave the Steelers a “C” for free agency and trades and a “C+” for their 2022 NFL Draft class. Overall, he had Pittsburgh earning a “C+” grade collectively this offseason.

Knox cited his reasoning for this, saying that Bleacher Report had Kenny Pickett as their 62nd overall player on their draft board (so taking him at pick 20 was a colossal reach in his mind). It also sounded like Knox thought the Steelers lost too many pieces this offseason with departing players like JuJu Smith-Schuster, Trai Turner, and James Washington.

Respectfully, I would have to disagree. While Pittsburgh’s offseason was perfect, I think it was stronger than Bleacher Report was giving it credit for.

What should Steelers offseason grade be?

The Steelers did have some players who left in free agency this offseason, but personally, I don’t think they lost anyone who is going to move the needle one way or the other. Ben Roethlisberger desperately needed to hang up his cleats, as he clearly didn’t have much left in the tank, while Trai Turner was a trainwreck most of the 2021 season.

Likewise, when JuJu Smith-Schuster did play, he was rather underwhelming and remarkably inefficient, and James Washington could barely see the field despite being healthy.

I think the Steelers did more than enough to replace their departing players and fix their holes with assets that could prove to be upgrades. I believe James Daniels will be an upgrade over Turner, while it’s hard to imagine that the combination of Geoge Pickens and Calvin Austin at WR could be less efficient than Smith-Schuster and Ray-Ray McCloud were last season.

A lot of this obviously hinges on the quarterback and what we think Kenny Pickett can do for this team moving forward. Though I wasn’t a big Pickett fan myself, I do believe that his ability to go through progressions and extend the play could be an improvement over an aging Big Ben in the near future.

Grouping Pittsburgh’s free agency and their NFL Draft together, I would give them a “B+” grade. There were some different choices I would have made, but I think they wisely filled holes in free agency so that could get a strong draft haul.