The Steelers head into the 2026 season with higher hopes for their receiving corps.
DK Metcalf caught 59 passes last season, but the rest of the group only had 77 and the 136 total receptions ranked 31st among receiving groups for the 2025 campaign. The Steelers addressed that shortcoming by trading for Michael Pittman Jr. and drafting two wideouts — second-rounder Germie Bernard and fourth-rounder Kaden Wetjen — in April.
New head coach Mike McCarthy isn’t counting out another returning member of the group, however. 2024 third-rounder Roman Wilson played just one game as a rookie and had 12 catches in 13 appearances last season, but McCarthy said that he liked how Wilson approached the offseason.
“He’s been here from Day 1,” McCarthy said, via Brooke Pryor of ESPN.com. “He was one of the first men to reach out and clearly ask what the expectation was of him, how I view him, how I saw him fitting in as the roles X, F and Z. He’s doing the work. He’s had a great offseason. I just need him to keep showing up and keep working his tail off because he’s got a skill set, there’s a lot there to work with. Roman’s done a really nice job.”
Metcalf and Pittman are going to be the top wideouts to kick off the season in Pittsburgh, but Wilson could find his way into a bigger role if his offseason work continues into training camp and leads to a strong bond with Aaron Rodgers.
Steelers Clips
An invitation to the Travis Kelce-Taylor Swift wedding was one kind of exclusive. Another recent NFL-related gathering took exclusive to another level.
Steelers quarterback Aaron Rodgers has posted on Instagram a photos of a gathering with six of his Steelers teammates: Michael Pittman Jr., Ben Skowronek, Roman Wilston, Mason Rudolph, DK Metcalf, and Pat Freiermuth.
The caption is “Last Rodeo,” along with "#bondingweek.”
The images include horses, cowboy hats, and campfires. The setting wide open and outdoors, with strong to quite strong Teton River vibes.
Rodgers has said this will be his final season. The “Last Rodeo” label further confirm it, setting up the 2026 season to be the rare full-season farewell tour for a franchise quarterback.
In what he says will be his final NFL season, Steelers quarterback Aaron Rodgers is in pursuit of a statistical milestone reached by only four other quarterbacks in NFL history.
Rodgers could top the 70,000-yard mark for his NFL career.
Heading into 2026, Rodgers has 66,274 career passing yards, so he needs 3,726 passing yards to reach the 70,000-yard milestone this season. That’s right around what Rodgers has been getting when healthy in recent years: He threw for 3,695 yards in 2022 in his final season with the Packers, threw for 3,897 yards in 2024 in his only healthy season with the Jets, and threw for 3,322 yards last year in his first season with the Steelers.
The odds at DraftKings have Rodgers as +200 to throw for at least 3,726 yards and finish with at least 70,000.
Greg Hawthorne, the Steelers’ first-round pick in 1979, has died. He was 69.
A member of the Super Bowl XIV-winning team, Hawthorne spent five seasons in Pittsburgh. He then played for the Patriots for three seasons, before finishing his career in Indianapolis in 1987 as a three-game replacement player during the strike.
Hawthorne played running back, receiver, and tight end during his eight-year NFL career. He finished with 527 rushing yards, 1,112 receiving yards, and 11 touchdowns.
In the 1985 AFC Championship upset of the Dolphins, Hawthorne recovered a fumble on the opening kickoff of the second half, setting up a touchdown that gave New England a 24-7 lead. The Patriots went on to upset Miami for a berth in Super Bowl XX, 31-14.
With 22,000 seats replaced at Acrisure Stadium, more new ones are coming.
Via Adam Babetski of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, the Pittsburgh Sports and Exhibition Authority has approved funding for nearly 18,000 new seats at the place where the Steelers and Panthers play their home games.
The request was made last year to swap out 58,719 of the 68,400 seats at Acrisure Stadium. Many of the original seats were deteriorating.
The new seats will consist of a blend between yellow (85 percent) and gray (15 percent), somewhat numbing the glare from the venue when empty.
“The sea of gold sometimes gets overwhelming, so we did a little black and gold in there this time around,” Steelers owner Art Rooney II said earlier this year.
The old seats have been sold, with more than $100,000 already generated and more than $100,000 more expected.
It’s not unusual for older players to get a reduced workload, but Steelers defensive tackle Cam Heyward accomplished something extremely impressive in 2025: He was both the NFL’s oldest defensive tackle, and the defensive tackle who played the most snaps.
According to the snap counts at pro-football-reference.com, Heyward played 832 defensive snaps, the most for any player whose listed position is defensive tackle. And he did that at age 36 as the oldest player in the league at his position.
Heyward turned 37 in May and is the only 37-year-old defensive tackle in pro football right now, although Ravens defensive tackle John Jenkins will join him on his birthday, tomorrow. (Jenkins played 523 defensive snaps last year.)
The Steelers clearly weren’t concerned that Heyward couldn’t withstand the punishment of a lot of playing time at age 36, because they also had him on the field for 129 special teams plays, the sixth-most special teams snaps of any defensive tackle in the league last year.
In March, the Steelers extended Heyward through the 2027 season, when he’ll be 38. And he may have some good years in him beyond that.
The clock keeps ticking for the Buccaneers and Baker Mayfield.
The Bucs are reportedly in “no rush” to extend Mayfield’s contract, which expires after the 2026 season. Mayfield has imposed a deadline for getting something done before the start of training camp.
The Buccaneers report for camp on July 28, only 19 days from now.
The problem seems to be simple to identify, anything but simple to solve. The market for veteran starting quarterbacks currently has a range of more than $40 million per year, from the low 20s to the mid 60s. Where does Mayfield land in that landscape?
While he’ll reportedly be getting $40 million this year (due to money that carried over from 2025), the APY remains $33.33 million. And the cash due this year under his contract is $27 million, with up to $5 million in incentives.
As we hear it, the Buccaneers believe they’ll offer Mayfield more than any other team would put on the table. They likely also believe that, when they move to their bottom-line position (probably just before July 28), Mayfield will take it.
And maybe he will. Sometimes, the bird in the hand — while not as big as Baker may like — is too large to let fly away. Especially since he’ll be carrying the risk of injury and sudden ineffectiveness through all 17 games of the 2026 season.
Mayfield, however, seems to be wired a little differently. He’s stubborn, in what some would say is a good way. He may stand on principle with this one, based on the fact that other quarterbacks with equal or lesser skills and abilities have cracked the $50 million APY threshold.
The Buccaneers may welcome this approach, confident that, whatever he does this season, they’ll still offer more than any other team.
That’s what happened after 2023, his first year in Tampa. Mayfield’s one-year deal expired, the Buccaneers didn’t use the franchise tag for 2024, and no one else made a serious play for his services. (Even though multiple teams should have.)
This time, the franchise tag (based on a 2026 cap number of $39.975 million), would be at least $47.97 million. If the Bucs win the Super Bowl or Mayfield becomes an MVP finalist, they’d be able to tag him for 2027.
But if Mayfield has a good-not-great year, and if the Bucs play it out with the same belief that they’ll offer him more than anyone else, here’s where Mayfield’s moxie can become a problem for the Bucs: he could take less from another team, just to prove a point.
And the one team that should be ready to make a move is the Steelers, where Mayfield’s mentality (and history with the Browns) would resonate with the fanbase in a big way.
If Mayfield goes, the Bucs would go back to the drawing board at quarterback. The other options currently on the roster are Jalon Daniels, Jake Browning, and Connor Bazelak.
So while it seems the Buccaneers have a plan, they need to account for the possibility that, if they make Mayfield play out the last year of his deal and don’t tag him, he could go elsewhere for less money — just to prove a point. And, based on the potential zeal with which he’s recruited, to embrace a team that truly wants him instead of a team that he may regard as being ambivalent about keeping him around.
The NFL is making a significant change to the offseason calendar for the 2027 season.
Tom Pelissero of NFL Media reports that the free agent negotiating window will open on March 9 next year. That is the same date that the two-day window opened this year, but the change comes in how close it will be to the end of the Scouting Combine.
NFL teams will wrap up their examinations and interrogations of incoming prospects on March 8 in 2027, which moves the league away from having a week or so between the two events as they have in past years.
Under that setup, the Combine has always been rife with table-setting for free agency as agents and team executives are all in the same place with their minds on the same things. With that gap eliminated, there will likely be even more of that work being done in Indianapolis so that teams are ready to make moves right from the starting gun.
Former NFL safety Myron Rolle went to medical school after he completed his playing career and the pediatric neurosurgeon is now coming back to work with the NFL Players Association.
The NFLPA announced that Rolle will be joining the union as a strategic advisor. Rolle’s work will focus on player health, brain cognition, and preventative care for active players.
“This sport gave my family joy, discipline, and community,” Rolle said in a statement. “To return now, as a physician, researcher and former player, and contribute to the wellbeing of the men who make this game what it is, feels deeply meaningful. I am honored to support the NFLPA’s mission and help advance a future where every player’s health is protected with the highest standard of care.”
Rolle was named a Rhodes Scholar while playing at Florida State and the Titans drafted him in the sixth round in 2010. He also spent time with the Steelers, but did not play in any regular season games before going back to Florida State for medical school in 2013.
Aaron Rodgers and Mike McCarthy are in their first year together in Pittsburgh, but after 13 years together in Green Bay, they know each other as well as any quarterback and head coach in the NFL.
Rodgers says he knows exactly what he needs to do in the McCarthy system, and it’s all about him having his timing down with his teammates.
“It’s just the next generations of the West Coast offense,” Rodgers said, via TribLive.com. “It went kind of Bill Walsh to kind of what Mike was doing with Paul Hackett, and then it’s kind of grown from there. From a real fundamental level, it’s all about the quarterback’s timing.”
Rodgers said McCarthy has changed some of the terminology in his offense since the two were last together on the 2018 Packers, but the system is fundamentally the same.
“I spent 13 years in [McCarthy’s offense],” Rodgers said. “He’s changed some stuff when he was in Dallas. . . . It’s stuff that we used to run, but he’s just called it something different now.”
In three months, McCarthy will hope to see Rodgers running that offense the same way he did in Green Bay.
