Aug 13, 2021 5 min read

When the Steelers say they go into every season intent on winning the Super Bowl, some people roll their eyes.

“Yeah, sure you do,” they say.

But the reality shows that to be the case.

Witness Thursday night’s news as the Steelers were beating the Eagles, 24-16, in their preseason game at Lincoln Financial Field.

Not long after the game began, reports out of Jacksonville began to trickle out that the Jaguars were trading former Pro Bowl linebacker Joe Schobert to the Steelers.

Schobert, a coverage linebacker who has seven interceptions the past two seasons, comes with just over $7 million in guaranteed money this season and has base salaries of $8.75, $10.25 and $10.75 million over the next three seasons.

Now, the Steelers can get out of that deal in future seasons without much, if any, cost against their salary cap, but they didn’t make the trade for a 27-year-old linebacker because they think they’ll just be OK this season.

They did it with the idea that he’ll help put them over the top in rounding out what promises to be one of the top defenses in the league.

As of this writing, the trade had not yet been finalized, but Schobert said via text message that, “I’m looking forward to meeting the team and getting to work. I’m excited to play in this defense.”

His addition will give the Steelers five players on their defense – Cam Heyward, T.J. Watt, Joe Haden and Minkah Fitzpatrick are the others – who have been to the Pro Bowl.

And it shows a commitment to winning the Super Bowl in 2021.

It also shows that these aren’t your father’s Steelers.

Last week, while speaking with team president Art Rooney II, I asked him about the team’s willingness to make trades like this for established veteran players, as the Steelers did two years ago for Fitzpatrick, and moving up in the draft as they did three years ago to acquire linebacker Devin Bush, and the shift to building contracts with voidable years as they did this year with JuJu Smith-Schuster, Trai Turner, Ben Roethlisberger and Melvin Ingram.

It shows a willingness to change with the times and be aggressive.

“We had to make adjustments that I guess we would rather not have made just because of the situation we were in with the cap going backwards like it did. We don’t expect that going forward,” Rooney replied. “So, we’ll look at everything again after this season and determine what we need to go back to or what changes that we need to make that are more permanent changes.”

This trade, once it goes through, would seem to be a sign that it’s full speed ahead in the Steelers’ quest to win a Super Bowl.

It might not work, but it won’t be for lack of trying.

n The trade will eat up more than half of the $11.8 million the Steelers have in salary cap space according to the NFLPA website. But offsetting salaries will mitigate that to a degree.

It also makes it very unlikely the Steelers will do a contract extension with cornerback Joe Haden, who told me last week he’s approached the team about staying in Pittsburgh beyond this season.

“I’m trying to work and get another extension now. It is what it is with the salary cap and stuff going down,” Haden told me in a one-on-one interview. “We’ve got to figure out what’s going on with T.J. (Watt), but they know how I feel here. I know that I want to be here, so we’re trying to figure something out.”

Haden might want an extension, but it just doesn’t make sound fiscal sense to give a 32-year-old cornerback an extension at this time, no matter how good he has been since joining the Steelers in 2017.

n A one-on-one interview? Yeah. It was the first I’ve done with a player in nearly two years. What a different world we live in.

But that was a nice return to a sense of normalcy, to be able to speak with a player at length in person, not on a Zoom call or press conference setting.

n There’s been a lot of talk regarding Watt’s sit-in – you can’t call it a holdout considering he’s in camp – but it’s not something that is going to linger into the season.

Watt will be on the field when the Steelers play Sept. 12 in Buffalo.

n The Pony World Series kicked off this weekend at Lew Hays Pony Field.

Again, a return to some kind of normalcy.

Mark Murphy and his team of workers who get the field ready for one of the biggest events in Washington County each year deserve a lot of credit for getting the field back into shape for the international event.

The field had not been worked on like that in two years and had hosted roughly 140 games, and even more practices, since the last World Series game was played. Kudos to that crew.