The Pittsburgh Steelers have a matchup with the 1-4 Cleveland Browns on Sunday and will look to come out of the bye and get to 4-1, while making sure the Browns don’t win a regular season game in Pittsburgh for the first time since 2003.
Coming out of the bye week, the Steelers are reasonably healthy, though they still took some time to work out a couple of free-agent linebackers on Wednesday in an effort to tighten up the defense a bit.
Insider Aaron Wilson shared on X that the Steelers conducted workouts with Isaiah Simmons and Michael Barrett to provide more depth in the front seven.
#Steelers worked out Isaiah Simmons and Michael Barrett
— Aaron Wilson (@AaronWilson_NFL) October 8, 2025
Simmons is a former first-round pick with 40 career starts under his belt, though he never quite lived up to the lofty expectations he had when the Arizona Cardinals selected him with the eighth overall pick out of Clemson in 2020.
Neither free agent has been signed yet, but Simmons played in every possible game since being drafted until finding himself on a practice squad to begin the 2025 season.
He’d be an intriguing flier to take since the ability is so tantalizing, and perhaps the Steelers could find a way to get more out of him than his previous regimes did.
Barrett was a seventh-round pick out of Michigan by the Carolina Panthers last year, so he’d obviously come with less of a pedigree, but could also be a candidate to bounce back from a rocky first tenure elsewhere.
Pittsburgh’s defense is fairly healthy at the moment, but adding either of these two linebackers would be an interesting depth move.
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