To listen to him talk and to see the energy and positivity with which he presents himself, you might be mistaken in taking Pittsburgh Steelers tight end Eric Ebron as somehow an unserious, undisciplined, or unmotivated person. Nothing could be further from the truth, and to hear him talk about the Steelers being 10-0 yesterday should really make that sink in.
When he first signed with the Steelers this offseason, he made a note to emphasize that he felt like he was coming to a team where he could have more success than he had had in his first six seasons.
While he may have undersold his previous teams’ track record—the Detroit Lions did got 11-5 his rookie year and had winning records in three of his four seasons; Andrew Luck’s Indianapolis Colts went 10-6 and won a playoff game in 2018—he is actually just one win away from matching the most accomplished season he has ever been a part of.
Early on in the year, he got a lot of joy in counting out the wins. First it was three, then four, then five. As they continued to mount, however, the wins didn’t get less significant—the broader picture simply came into view.
“I wouldn’t say it feels routine. I wouldn’t say it feels normal” to win, he told reporters, via a video provided by the team’s media department. “I feel like we have a purpose, and I think when your purpose is bigger than everything else, then it makes these games not as celebratory. We’re not as much like, ‘oh yeah, we won!’. We’re like, ‘okay, we got 10 wins. How the hell do we get 11?’”.
“I feel like this team just has a purpose, and when you wake up with a purpose and when you do things with a purpose, it causes for things to be done the right way, the proper way, and everybody knows what type of time we’re on, what page we’re on”, he went on. “I feel like that’s this team. We just have a purpose”.
And he made very clear not only how to keep that drive, but what it is driving to. “At the end of the day, win the Super Bowl”, he said. “That’s the only way you get full of this. Because at the end of the day, if we don’t win the Super Bowl, then going 10-0 was so pointless. At the end of the day, we’ve got to win a Super Bowl”.
Ebron went to the postseason in three of his first six years in the league, going 1-3 in the process and never advancing beyond the Divisional Round. He sees what the Steelers are putting together this year and how big of a season they can have as long as they keep their focus on the task at hand. The goal isn’t 10-0, 11-0, 16-0. It’s 1-0 in the final game of the season, year in and year out. It doesn’t matter what road you take to get there as long as you’re on time.
