Practice-squad players make big impact on playoff teams

When Eric Rowe’s phone buzzed on cut day in late August, the veteran safety wasn’t exactly sure why.

The answer came as a shock. The Carolina Panthers, who signed Rowe to a one-year deal last April to help a team eyeing a reboot under rookie quarterback Bryce Young, wanted to waive Rowe and put him on the practice squad if he didn’t find work elsewhere.

Ummm, what?

“I was like, ‘I’ve been in this league. I had a good season (with Miami in 2022), had a good camp, I played and started in the Super Bowl, the biggest games,” said Rowe, who won a pair of titles with New England earlier in his career. “Why am I on the practice squad?”

It’s not that Rowe considered the practice squad beneath him. He did accept the gig after all and has long considered practice squadders the hardest-working players on the team. It’s just that he came of age during a time in the NFL when the unit was strictly the bastion of largely unheralded younger players coaches considered not quite ready for the 53-man active roster, players eager to do whatever they could to remain in the league.

And while the NFL tweaked the rules around the practice squad during the COVID-19 pandemic — bumping them in size from 10 to 16 and opening eligibility to players of all experience levels instead of those with three years or less — the stigma of being in a group that has its nose pressed against the window of the 53-man roster lingered.

“It took a while to get my ego back down,” Rowe said. Rowe smiles while telling the story. Maybe because he’s telling it in the Pittsburgh Steelers locker room. The player who was taken aback when put on the practice squad in Carolina — which ultimately waived Rowe in mid-September — couldn’t answer “yes” fast enough when the Steelers called him the week before Thanksgiving and asked him to join their practice squad to help out their injury-ravaged secondary.

“’Hey, put me on there,’” Rowe told Pittsburgh’s front office. “If it gets me playing again, I will be on there.”

Rowe is hardly alone. The rosters of many of the teams playing during wild-card weekend are dotted with accomplished players whose careers would likely have been over under the pre-pandemic practice squad rules.

Practice squad alums eyeing a shot at the Super Bowl include Cleveland quarterback Joe Flacco, and Steelers linebacker Myles Jack, who was “retired” and trying to run the minor-league hockey team he owns in the northern Dallas suburbs when Pittsburgh signed him the same day they brought Rowe into the fold.