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Tuesday morning the Pittsburgh Steelers announced they had traded outside linebacker Melvin Ingram to the Kansas City Chiefs for a sixth-round pick in the 2022 NFL draft.
That same afternoon head coach Mike Tomlin spoke to the media and dropped one of our favorite Tomlinisms in talking about why the team decided to trade the disgruntled linebacker.
“It’s better to have volunteers as opposed to hostages.”
“On the trade front, we (announced) this morning that we traded Melvin Ingram,” said Tomlin. “I enjoyed working with Melvin. It just didn’t work out the way we envisioned, the way he envisioned, and sometimes that happens in free agency. And that’s really, culturally why we build our team primarily through the draft.”
The Steelers will now turn to another former first-round pick, Taco Charlton to help solidify the outside linebacker rotation along with T.J. Watt and Alex Highsmith. Ingram definitely had loftier expectations for what his role would be in the defense but Charlton is probably just happy to be on a 53-man roster at this point so he isn’t going to complain.
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