Despite being gone for so long, Faneca knows of Steelers pain
More than a decade has come and gone since he last blasted a shoulder pad into anyone, last crumpled some luckless defender to the floor of an NFL stadium, last carried his helmet into that Hall of Fame sunset.
You won’t be surprised, but they are still putting Alan Faneca back together again.
Wewere going over his surgeries onthe phone the other day from Virginia Beach, where the great Steelers guardis coaching high school football, andhe thinks there have been eight of them, a relatively modest number for someonewho got through 13 autumns of wicked Sundays.
“I been putting off my shoulder for
years, even before COVID,” hesaid. “I never once thought along my journey that I wasn’t gonna need some bionic parts at some point down the line to repair some of the damage that I was doing. At the NFL level ,if you don’t think that’s comin’, you’re fooling yourself because it’s a very brutal game.”
Sothe guy Steelers teammate sand coaches used to call BigRed for his flowing red hairand his outsized influence on some of their greatest successes go this bionic shoulder only this spring at Vanderbilt University, one of theprimary medical centers partnering with the Pro Football Hallof Fame in a venture called Hall of Fame Health, a programto help post-career footballers with health-related issues, of which there are many.
That right shoulder, the trigger for countless full-menacecollisions going back to highschool, had unavoidably be end estabilized, disclocated, and ultimately in need of the Vanderbilt implant (“a new shoulder ”Big Red called it), and thus it joins there constructed left shoulder, the left ankle, right wrist, several fingers, and various other parts whose surgeries have faded from memory.
What hasn’t faded very muchat all is his football memory, especially as he looks in on the current Steelers and identifies some stunning parallels.
“You hate to use the word, the ‘T’ word, but it’s a bit of a transition year,” he said. “They’re takin’ their lumps andyou just gotta learn from them.The offensive line has pick edit up from last year. Withan offensive line, there is always stuff we can do better, andI always look at it from that framework. We could have given the quarterback more time, kept him cleaner. Even when an offensive line is hitting on all cylinders and everybody’s patting ’em on the back, they’re in the room talkin’ about what they all can do better.”
When Faneca looks up and seesthe Steelers dragging around a 3-7 record, he knows too well the feeling. He and his 2003teammates had the same predicament and it hasn’t happened since.
“Wehad a couple other slow starts, but anytime you’re3-7 or anything near that, you just have to remember one, this is a job and it is a profession.And you still gotta cometo work and you gotta putin the time and you gotta putit in with the same enthusiasm as you did if you were 73.
“Andit’s hard. It’s not an easy thing to do. You gotta focuson yourself. How can I make things better? Then, howcan we be better as a group? If everybody does that, that’s when you’ll start seeing tighter games, better results, that’s how you turn the tide.”
That2003 team steadied itself to finish 3-3, but the tide didn’t fully turn until the offense was turned over to a rookie quarterback who happened to be the club’s top draft pick. Faneca famously dreaded it, famously saying “No, it’s not exciting,” about the prospect of Ben Roethlisberger starting in just the third game of the 2004 season. “Doyou want to go with some young kid out of college?”
Itwas fortunate that team wasso talented everywhere else that Roethlisberger had little choice but to learn fast; they went 15-1 and won the
SuperBowl a year later. But what Faneca feared back then, and had every right to, is what you’re seeing now — a rookie quarter back and a first-roundpick who’s learning at a more conventional pace on a team that not talented enough to cover for him.
“Every young player, regard less of position, is going to comein and make mistakes,” Faneca said. “Even if you play ata Pro Bowl, All-Pro level, you’re still going to make the occasional mistake that the guy that’s been there a couple of years is not. Those lumps haveto be taken and they’re just most visible when you’ve got the ball in your hand most ofthe time. You’ve just gotta kind of grin and bear it and moveon.”
Faneca eventually moved onto the Jets for a couple of seasons, then another with the Cardinals before finishing his career. He started every singlegame of his final nine season sand 201 of 206 in a career that included nine Pro Bowl sand a Super Bowl, where his crunching block on Seattle linebacker LeRoy Hill catapulted Willie Parker towarda 75-yard touchdown run, longest in the game’s history.
Hestill gets excited for the Friday night light sat Cox High in Virginia, and you’ d think if you’ re carrying a Super Bowl ring and another that says Hall of Fame Class of 2021, teenagers listen to you.
Faneca won’t even be 46 until next week, so it’s imperative that he can be fully active with his wife, Julie, and his three young children. It’ll be better now that he’s essentially back in one piece.