Larry Ogunjobi only got here a little under a year ago. After spending five years in the AFC North with the Ohio teams, he signed with the Pittsburgh Steelers as a free agent on June 21, so Wednesday will be his one-year anniversary with the team.
It’s been more than he even though it might be when he first came to town, as he told Missi Matthews in an interview for the team’s website. It probably doesn’t hurt that they gave him a contract while he was recovering from an injury and allowed him to work his way through it, but it goes beyond that experience.
“I think it’s better”, he told Matthews when he was asked if, a year on, being a Steeler and a member of this organization is what he thought it would be. “You hear on the outside, especially being on the other side for five years. Being around it and seeing it, you understand what the culture, what the Steelers mean. That hard-nosed football, that ‘standard is the standard’, you hear about it but then when you experience it, it’s totally different. I’m excited”.
Remember, he was drafted by the Cleveland Browns and spent four years there before playing one season for the Cincinnati Bengals. Pittsburgh was always the enemy. He even got suspended during the Myles Garrett melee in 2019 when he shoved Mason Rudolph to the ground after his teammate walloped him on the head.
Now he’s a Steeler through and through. And, again, the money surely doesn’t hurt matters, but it seems as though his time behind enemy lines has made a convert out of him. Truth be told, he was always a Steelers type of player coming out of Charlotte, so it’s no surprise that he has been able to fit in so well.
Both sides now intend to get the most out of their partnership with Ogunjobi back up and running at full strength, eyeing a career year after being somewhat limited in just how high a level he could play in 2022 due to injury.
His is far from a unique story, truth be told, though we also have to be fair and not pretend as though the Steelers are the only team with such stories. Still, it does seem very common that when they bring in players from other organization, they tend to be compared favorably.
It’s rare that anybody leaves town and has much of anything bad to say, though there have been exceptions. Nick Vannett’s one season here wasn’t exactly the greatest experience in 2019. Jesse James had a choice comment or two, even if misconstrued, that was rooted in the residue of the Killer Bs implosion. But ask guys like Javon Hargrave and Terrell Edmunds about their time here. Even Melvin Ingram had flattering things to say about Pittsburgh even after asking to be traded.
There is something to the way in which the Steelers, from an organizational level all the way down, treat their players, and it’s fundamentally rooted in humanity. Yes, there is the business side of things, but I don’t know that there is another team in the NFL that does a better job of treating their players as people while also retaining their own identity. It makes the newcomers want to fit into that culture, which is why it has persisted for so long.
