Any long term analysis of giving Brown $15 million/year is probably not going to look good.
But when your franchise QB is leaking indications of retirement, you don't play the "long term game" anymore. As numerous people have said, this is a 3-year plan now for the Steelers. Not a 5-year plan. I don't really like that, but I can't really argue against it either.
That's why we aren't going to use a high pick (first three rounds) on a QB. That's why we're going to continue to cut some corners on salary cap in weird places (backup QB, kicker, punter) to make up "keeping the core group" together, especially on offense. The Steelers already have the biggest disparity in the league between offense and defense salary cap allocation. That's going to go up even more this off-season when we give contracts to Bell and Brown.
We are turning into the mid-2000's Indianapolis Colts. That team, under Polian, invested heavily in a "core group" of offensive weapons around Manning and then used a majority of their draft picks to keep the defense young, fast and versatile to let Dungy/Kiffin teach them their way.
I'm not sure it works (they did win a Super Bowl) but that's the method of operation our teams seems to be emulating. I would also argue that method doesn't work against the method of operation and coaching Bill Belichick and New England use. Like Indianapolis in the 2000's, they often came up short against Belichcik, Brady and their methods of CHEATING teams. The idea of a potent offense and opportunistic, fast, turnover-dependent defense never seems to work against New England.
We'll see if we can overcome that mountain in the next 3 years like Indy did in 2006.
