I’ll award the Steelers the highest possible rating for highway robbery.
They paid a very low sum to get a good quarterback.
That’s a bargain that would make a mattress store envy.
The Steelers forfeited not just their one and only Day 3 choice, but also this year’s draft.
Fields may make that choice a fourth-round pick if he plays well enough. Fields will have cost the Steelers a fourth-round pick in 2019 if he ends up starting for them. That’s a wise business move.
Fields is not perfect, but he is still a talented player who has improved each of his three seasons.
His skill is the kind that calls for chances to try again and again.
His transfer to Pittsburgh has some similarities to Ryan Tannehill’s departure from Miami for Tennessee, where he was originally supposed to “back up” Marcus Mariota.
Tannehill was able to quickly change the course of events, earn Comeback Player of the Year, and lead Tennessee to several division titles.
That kind of upside is provided by Fields. What happens with Russell Wilson, who Mike Tomlin claims “has pole position” in the competition for Pittsburgh’s top job, is still to be seen.
However, strong teams don’t stop hitting quarterbacks, backing down if
From that angle, a trade makes sense, but wow, that was a bad return on a quarterback selected in the first round. Poles seemed to misjudge the market at an early stage or be unwilling to postpone creating one.
It’s one thing to not want his rookie quarterback to go into a locker room that still housed another quarterback who had garnered vocal support from colleagues.
It’s quite another to ship the incumbent out for what amounts to a middle seat at the rear of the coach that may advance to a middle seat in business class.
The Cardinals dealt Josh Rosen after Kyler Murray was picked in the 2019 draft; the Bears might have held onto Fields until the summer (Baker Mayfield wasn’t traded from Cleveland until July of 2022) in the hopes that a stronger market would present itself.
There may have been a necessity if a starter had been injured. Could doing so have led to some awkward discussions and tension? Yes.
Perhaps we should applaud Poles for choosing to ease the tension in the locker room as a whole, in a league that is all about “business being business,” but the return probably suffered as a result.
