The Pittsburgh Steelers may no longer be “Warren Sapp is going to yell about it” old, but they’re still among the older teams in football according to research done by Andrew Walker in a recent tweet. He compiled the average age for each club. The Steelers tied for the 20th-oldest team with an average age of 25.44 years. That comes in slightly above the average of 24.98 years.
Here’s the list.
The oldest Steeler on the roster, of course, is Ben Roethlisberger at 39 years old. He’s set to become the third 39-year-old to play for Pittsburgh, joining James Harrison in 2017 and punter Bobby Walden in 1977. The franchise has never had anyone age 40 play for them.
The other 30+ players on the roster are Tyson Alualu (34), Cameron Heyward (32), Joe Haden (32), Vince Williams (31), David DeCastro (31), Chris Boswell (30), and Jordan Berry (30). Maybe it’s just me, but I honestly didn’t realize Boswell and Berry were both in the 30-club.
For the start of the 2020 season, the Steelers had an average age of 26 years old, 17th in football. This study may be including the youth of a 90-man roster which may be pushing down averages across the board.
Here’s the Steelers’ average age and rank by year.
2015: 26.6 (26th)
2016: 26.3 (24th)
2017: 26.1 (18th)
2018: 25.9 (16th)
2019: 25.7 (14th)
2020: 26.0 (17th)
2021: 25.4 (20th)
At their youngest, they sat middle of the pack and at their oldest, they were close to the bottom. It’s no surprise for a team who’s been able to keep their core and never hit the reset button of tearing down the roster and starting over. It’ll be interesting to see if that begins to change as the Steelers embark on a new era. The offensive line, for example, has gotten much younger with the departures of Alejandro Villanueva, Ramon Foster, and Maurkice Pouncey over the past two years. The Steelers’ 25.4 average age is the youngest they’ve had dating back to at least 2015. Though again, whether the offseason nature of the study influenced that is unclear.
The youngest team in the league is the Los Angeles Rams at 24.6 years. The oldest goes to the Houston Texans at 26.3.
