Adam Schefter made Pittsburgh Steelers headlines last weekend when he referred to Aaron Rodgers as the team’s third choice behind Justin Fields and Matthew Stafford. And with Art Rooney II stating his preference of re-signing one of their two starting quarterbacks from last season, it was assumed that Fields was their first choice. According to Schefter, that wasn’t the case.
“It was really as much chronological as it was anything else,” Schefter said, clarifying his recent reports via 97.1 The Fan’s Rothman & Ice. “They started in the offseason and the initial calls were about acquiring Matthew Stafford and they had conversations with the Rams about trading for him. And once it didn’t get done, they continued during that time talking with Justin Fields. Obviously stepped up effort to get a deal done with Fields.”
If the Steelers main goal was to sign Fields this offseason, doesn’t it seem like they would have been able to? The money part of things is almost irrelevant because the Steelers have so much cap space and needed to spend cash this offseason. And Fields is only the 20th highest-paid quarterback in the league at $20 million per season. Rodgers ended up getting less.
Fields’ career was revived in Pittsburgh. It would have made sense for him to want to remain in that situation to further build up his resume in an offensive system that worked for him. So what went wrong?
“They could not get a deal done. Either because they were only willing to go to a certain price or because he felt like here’s a team that benched me. Why do I wanna go back to a team that benched me?” Schefter said. “…Maybe if they’d been more aggressive from the jump when the season ended, maybe the chance of that might have been better. I don’t know, that’s a Justin Fields question.”
If the Steelers were telling Fields that he was their first priority and then his agent caught wind of them pursuing Stafford, it would make sense why he wanted to go elsewhere. The Steelers showed they were now confident in Fields last season when they benched him at 4-2, and they were essentially doing the same by putting Stafford first in the offseason wishlist.
“They were all-in on Stafford,” Schefter said. “It didn’t get done. They shifted their focus to Fields. It didn’t get done. They then went on to Aaron Rodgers…If Rodgers was committed to them earlier, maybe he would’ve been a higher or top consideration, but he wasn’t.”
Considering that Sean McVay told Good Morning Football yesterday that Rodgers was a consideration, it sounds feasible that there was a time they were preparing to possibly lose Stafford. Had the Steelers managed to pry him away in a trade, Rodgers probably would have jumped at the opportunity to play with the Rams and his favorite teammate Davante Adams.
So it isn’t so much that Rodgers was their third choice in a strict ranked order, but there were varying levels of urgency with each player. If they wanted Stafford, they needed to make something happen before the Rams decided to keep him. If they wanted Fields, he was actively shopping around free agency. Rodgers told teams at the start that he wasn’t ready to sign anywhere yet and that level of uncertainty may have driven the Steelers towards the other, more urgent options.
In the end it was a swing and a miss on Matthew Stafford, which may or may not have ruined their chances with Fields. And that entire sequence drove them to a three-month wait to sign Rodgers.
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