Empty seats at Heinz Field make pursuit of Aaron…

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Many were surprised (some pleasantly, some not) to see the Steelers as a viable potential destination for quarterback Aaron Rodgers. It doesn’t fit with the team’s overall approach to team-building, especially not at quarterback.

But the team’s latest search for a new quarterback following the retirement of a Hall of Famer comes at a quietly precarious time for the Steelers. In 2021, local TV ratings dropped 10 percent. Likewise, and as recently noted by John Luciew of PennLive.com, ticket sales are down — and no-shows are up.

The average attendance at Heinz Field for what became Ben Roethlisberger’s farewell season was 60,400, roughly 8,000 below capacity. Even if the tickets for most of those empty seats had been purchased, the balance sheets of NFL teams also need people to show up and buy overpriced food, drinks, and merchandise.

And so, as Luciew suggests, the Steelers will be poised to stimulate the fan base by spending money.

The Steelers already have roughly $30 million in cap space for 2022, and that’s before engaging in the usual cap-clearing techniques of dumping bloated contracts, extending ascending players in the latter years of their deals, and/or renegotiating others, kicking cap dollars into years where the cap will be even higher, if not dramatically higher.

Enter Rodgers. He’d command a huge salary, if he wants a huge salary. (He could deliberately take a lot less, in order to help the Steelers put talented players around him.) And he’d definitely fill the stadium at the confluence of the Ohio, Allegheny, and Monongahela.

There would be no unsold tickets in Pittsburgh. There would be no unused tickets, either. The Steelers would become one of the most interesting, most followed, and most talked-about teams in the entire league. At a time when some of the key local metrics are suggesting that the Yinzers are yawning, landing Rodgers is precisely the move that would cause them to snap out of the current funk.