Raise your hand if you did not have an idea yesterday that Dwayne Haskins would be relevant to your life in some way. For the record, I hold up my hand, but now I am laying out articles about the draft pick in the first round in 2019 that has just signed a contract with the Pittsburgh Steelers.
While this is virtually no risk, the background obviously makes the story much bigger than it should have been, and he obviously has the power to make it as big as he wants, provided he performs well and whatever desired.
The Washington football team did not feel he did, and so he was let go, despite having a strong head coach in Ron Rivera and a very experienced veteran presence around him at the quarterback in Alex Smith – which he will also be in Pittsburgh with Mike Tomlin and Ben Roethlisberger. Smith recently spoke about his former teammate on the Yahoo Sports NFL Podcast.
“The first thing I hope for Dwayne – and I’ve already told him that – is that you do not have a chance until you have cleared up many of the distractions in your life,” he said. “It’s tough as a young player, as a young jogger, certainly as a quarterback with a lot of weight and expectations.”
“You have a lot of voices telling you different things. “Ultimately it comes down to it playing well on the soccer field,” he added. ‘You have to be able to eliminate all the other things, because none of that matters if you can not go and play at a high level. You will never be able to develop in the player, to your potential if you also do not eliminate all those things. So my hope for Dwayne is to do that. ”
It is not uncommon for a team to give up on a first-quarter within two years without at least getting something back for it in the way of trade compensation, and needless to say it is always an important red flag is when something like this happens.
The chances that Haskins will actually develop in the Steelers’ franchise quarter are pretty low, let’s just get it there. But it certainly wouldn’t be bad if he could build on an adequate backup – or at least someone who would want to sign another team to give them a compensatory choice.