The perils of being over budget!!!!

So to fill you in on the writers of these blogs im TheWestley and im a Pittsburgh Steelers fan (and I refer to them as us even though I have never been to Pittsburgh nor am I associated to the franchise in anyway but support) and my partner in crime Andy is a New England Patriots fan. So you can imagine how happy I am that we may lose our best Wide receiver (for the novice a wide receiver is the guys who run forwards and try to catch the ball) to his Patriots for a utterly rubbish 31^st pick in the 2012 draft (that’s out of 32 picks for the novices out there)

The reason for this is that the Steelers are way over the Salary cap and cannot move enough around to “franchise” Mike Wallace and he is out of contract at the end of the season. A long term deal seems unlikely now and “franchising” him would cost us $9m and we are already miles over budget and have had to restructure many contracts just to try and get within budget. Now we are going to have to improve Wallace’s contract from the $3.5m that he was getting from his rookie contract to at least $9m WHERE THE HELL DO YOU FIND $6m FROM NOWHERE????

There are talks that Big Ben and James Harrison are willing to take guaranteed bonuses instead of there normal pay making the cap lower but how do you go from $20m over to $10m under by restructuring peoples contracts. I cant see a way that we can do this without cutting the likes of Ward who have offered us so much in the last few years. The loyalty these players how shown Pittsburgh shouldn’t be ignored and in my opinion I would rather we stuck to our loyal players who might be getting on and if Mike Wallace cares about playing for the Steelers then he will sign a deal with us and if he wants to move on for the money then the steelers are going to have to rely on the likes of Antonio Brown, Emmanuel Sanders and Jerricho Cotchery who would have to step up a few notches.

If you said to me who is the most important player to the Steelers on offence my answer would be Mike Wallace. He speads the Defence down the field and pushes the other teams defence down the field meaning that Ben should get more options in the centre of the field. But whats to say we cant find another speedster in the draft??? Well the Steelers have the number 23 pick in the 2012 draft and then whatever pick they get from the Mike Wallace deal (the teams rumoured to be interested are 21^st pick, 29^th pick, 30^th pick and 31^st pick) and the Steelers never trade up. It would be Mike Wallace’s pick of where he goes but he has already said that he will not leave unless he can go into a potential Superbowl winning team ruling out teams like St Louis Rams, Cleveland Browns, Minnesota Vikings or Tampa Bay Buccaneers who all have really good draft picks and you can also rule out the likes of Indianapolis Colts who have the number 1 pick but WILL Draft Quarter Back Andrew Luck. The best pick we could get for a team who have enough budget and could win the superbowl (in a few years) would probably be the Carolina Panthers number 8 (or 9 pick depending on the toss of a coin) pick and that wouldn’t get us Justin Blackmon who is the most like Wallace coming out of the collage game this year.

Also the answer wont be signing a Vincent Jackson or Desean Jackson who look like they may hit the open market for the following reasons A) the Steelers NEVER build through free agency as they feel you don’t get value for money and B) we wouldn’t get value for money on these players because they think they are as good as Mike Wallace so will want Mike Wallace style money SO WE MAY AS WELL SIGN MIKE WALLACE THEN!!!!!!!!!

I don’t know what the answer is but maybe its let Wallace go. Get 2 picks for this year trade them to St Louis Rams for their number 2 pick get Justin Blackmon as a replacement for Wallace. If St louis agree to that (and they wont).