Go ahead and take a gander at the Pittsburgh Steelers’ 90-man roster right now. There is a variety of information that you can draw from it, but perhaps one of the most concerning for the Steelers is the fact that there is quite a dearth of championship experience making up that group of players.
Only six players are left on the roster from the 2008 Super Bowl championship team, those being Ben Roethlisberger, William Gay, James Harrison, Greg Warren, Lawrence Timmons, and Matt Spaeth. Of those six, only Roethlisberger, Harrison, and Warren were a part of the 2005 championship team.
From the Steelers’ own roster, we only add five more names among the participants in the 2010 Super Bowl, when Pittsburgh fell in the title game to the Packers. Those names are Ramon Foster, Antonio Brown, Maurkice Pouncey, David Johnson, and Shaun Suisham. The latter two names are far from guaranteed to make the 53-man roster this year.
You can add, however, two more names to the list, as the Steelers did in free agency, among those who at least know what it’s like to experience Super Bowl Sunday. Free agent linebacker Steven Johnson was a part of the Denver Broncos when they were blown out by the Seahawks at the end of the 2013 season.
But offensive tackle Ryan Harris’s one-year stead with the Broncos ended on a bit more favorable terms. The 31-year-old veteran started all 16 games for Denver last year in the regular season and all throughout the playoffs as they advanced to their eighth Super Bowl in club history, and their third victory.
Harris was on Washington DC yesterday visiting with the President at the White House as part of the Broncos’ Super Bowl celebrations while the rest of the Steelers’ roster was having fun at a bowling alley, but you can imagine that they would rather be in the nation’s capital—aside from Harrison—because it will have meant that they accomplished their goal.
Whenever it might be that the Broncos are officially awarded their Super Bowl rings, which will evidently be later this month on the 12th, Harris will have a nice show-and-tell item to bring to the locker room to show off, and I certainly think that he should. It is, after all, what everybody in that locker room is striving for, whether it is somebody like Harrison who is looking to get back there, or DeAngelo Williams, who came to Pittsburgh after a long career in Carolina to pursue his Super Bowl aspirations.
To see that prize in the flesh, a tangible representation of what it means to achieve the game’s ultimate goal, should be quite a motivating force to drive home the fact that this metal object right here is what we are looking to achieve, a symbol of our victory.
Only, the goal is to have that ring emblazoned with the emblem of the Pittsburgh Steelers, rather than some silly stallion. And, somehow, some way, they will have to figure out a way to get an unprecedented seven diamonds onto it. That would be an excellent problem to have.
