A timely 'Big Ben' Roethlisberger
TAMPA - As resurrections from the dead go, Ben Roethlisberger did a pretty good Lazarus last night.
Three years ago, the Steelers quarterback looked like a deer in the headlights throughout Super Bowl XL against Seattle, a game he admitted last week his team won despite him.
Last night was far different. Redeem yourself different, as Roethlisberger went 21-for-30 for 256 yards and saved his first Super Bowl touchdown pass for the final 35 seconds of a 27-23 Steelers win.
"He’s not the same guy he was in the last one," coach Mike Tomlin said. "He was a young guy in the last one. He’s a franchise quarterback that we have a long-term commitment to (now). He’s our guy and he showed why tonight."
What he showed was poise, pluck and precision, completing 5-of-7 passes for 84 yards on the Steelers’ game-winning drive. That included a 40-yard throw to Santonio Holmes that moved the ball to the Arizona 6, followed by a 6-yard, game-winning touchdown pass that Holmes caught as he was falling out of bounds with three Cardinals around him.
It was the kind of reception you remember and the kind of clutch passing you don’t forget.
"That was an awesome catch, pitch and throw," Arizona cornerback Dominique Rodgers-Cromartie said. "The ball was delivered right there, and he compensated and got his feet in."
To hit that pass, Roethlisberger first had to go through his reads as calmly as a man can when his blood pressure is soaring to about 900 over 750. "I was going to throw the ball in the flat, but they covered it up, so I went to Hines (Ward)," he said. "He was covered, getting held, but all of a sudden I saw ’Tone go to the corner and I threw it. I thought it was going to be picked."
It wasn’t because Roethlisberger was a far different quarterback than the one who arrived in Detroit three years ago a bundle of nerves.
"I felt a lot better,” he said. “I didn’t have the jitters."
Roethlisberger did it last night the old-fashioned way, like in the schoolyard.
"The name of that play?" he said when asked what the winner was called. "Drop back, scramble right, scramble left, find someone open."
That was more than good enough to erase one individual Super Bowl disappointment and replace it with a second Super Bowl ring and the kind of last-second pass you tell your grandchildren about.