The Pittsburgh Steelers Traded A First Round Pick For Minkah Fitzpatrick

The Dolphins are tanking the likes the NFL has never seen before. There have been bad teams, 0-16 teams, incompetent teams. The Dolphins may have all of those ingredients, it remains to be seen. Having three first round picks sounds great, but we just watched the Raiders get laughed at mercilessly for how they allocated their three first round picks. Get Tua and some help and maybe they’ll be fine. Or maybe all three of their first round picks will tell them they want to be traded immediately like Minkah Fitzpatrick just did. Time will tell, but I’m not ready to give the Dolphins any sort of benefit of the doubt. They took a highly touted prospect, played him for precisely one (1) year, and then flipped him for likely a lower pick than they selected him with. Hustling backwards 101.

From the Steelers perspective, I don’t like the trade. I love the trade. Big Ben just got hurt. Big whoop. That defense hasn’t been right in what feels like a decade. They saw a guy with 3+ years left on his deal and made a move. Fitzpatrick hasn’t set the world on fire in the NFL yet, but to be fair to him the Dolphins very well may have been using him wildly incorrectly. He was a dominant defender at Alabama and was seen by legitimately everybody on the planet as a can’t miss prospect coming out. I’m going to go ahead and blame the Dolphins for using him as a Patrick Chung type linebacker hybrid as opposed to letting him play the position that got him drafted in the first place full time. Were the Steelers truly going to bottom out and get Tua or Herbert at the top of the draft with this pick? Probably not. Now they can get some continuity with their defense the rest of this season, they already have their 2020 first round pick in their system, and now they can focus on replacing the skill players they’ve let leave over the last two years.