On Wednesday, the news broke that the Pittsburgh Steelers were doing a simple restructure of edge defender Alex Highsmith’s contract to free up $7 million in salary cap space. This type of restructure is just a matter of moving some base salary into a bonus and pushing that base salary to later in the deal.
Based on the numbers at Over the Cap, this move would leave the Steelers with something in the neighborhood of $18,139,353 million in cap space heading into the 2024 NFL draft.
No team amasses that level of cap space just days before the draft unless there’s a plan to try and trade for a player who is going to cost big bucks. The position we keep hearing about with the Steelers is wide receiver. Specifically San Francisco 49ers wide receiver Brandon Aiyuk and Denver Broncos wide receiver Cortland Sutton.
The first round of the 2024 NFL draft kicks off on Thursday night and if the Steelers front office has a plan, it will all be clear by then.