Steelers hold Cameron Heyward to the standard Mike Tomlin escapes but deserves

The last remaining domino around NFL training camps finally dropped on the eve of Week 1, as the Pittsburgh Steelers came to an agreement with stalwart defensive lineman Cam Heyward on a new deal on Saturday evening. The contract comes after months of increasingly tense back-and-forth between the two parties, with the 36-year-old Heyward (quite understandably) demanding a pay bump given just how badly he outperformed his $14.5 million salary last season.

Now Heyward has his new deal, and it does indeed bring the potential to tack on more money. But it also comes with a catch: According to several reports, that money comes tied to incentives — incentives based not on Heyward's play but the Steelers' performance in 2025.

It's unclear just what those escalators look like, but from the sound of it, Heyward will get a chunk of change in the event of a Pittsburgh playoff berth in addition to any subsequent playoff wins. Which is ... certainly a choice, considering all the attention around the fact that Heyward's coach, Mike Tomlin, has not led this franchise to a single postseason victory in a decade now.

On the one hand, you have to admire Heyward's optimism and self-belief; no one is more synonymous with Steelers' hard-nosed vision, and he's clearly confident in this team's ability to make some real noise with Aaron Rodgers now under center. On the other, it's hard to ignore the irony here: Pittsburgh has been content to remain mired in frustrating mediocrity for years now, giving Tomlin seemingly endless leash to run the team the way he sees fit despite diminishing results. Now they finally decide to play hard ball, and do so not with Tomlin himself but with one of their most loyal soldiers?

Steelers' hard line with Cameron Heyward is ironic considering Mike Tomlin's complacency

The Steelers in recent years have been defined by an aversion to the very idea of rocking the boat. This is a franchise that prides itself on stability, a stability borne over decades: No matter how stale things appeared to get under Tomlin in recent years, no one around Pittsburgh seemed to even consider the possibility of making a major change. Stay the course, stick to the Steelers Way, and things would work out.

So there's a bit of humor in the idea that this is how they've chosen to compensate Heyward, one of the best interior disruptors in the sport despite his age. He's been an iron man for years now, showing no signs of slowing down, and it made sense that he'd like to be compensated in accordance with his performance on the field. Rather than doing so without much of a fuss, Pittsburgh decided that actually it was willing to demand more from its most important faces.

"Take us on a deep playoff run or no dice" is a fair-enough message, I suppose, but it shouldn't be lost on anyone that it's not a message the team has felt the need to deliver Tomlin at any point over the past few years. You can cite his overall record, and the way he's overachieved relative to his personnel (particularly on offense), but that ignores the fact that said personnel is in large part molded in Tomlin's image. This is the team he wants, run the way he wants, and it simply hasn't been good enough for a long time now.

One of the few things that has been is Heyward. Rather than reward him for that production, though, the Steelers decided to make a show of it. Hopefully they'll do the same with Tomlin if their dalliance with Rodgers ends in nine more wins and another first-round exit.