Hines Ward
Hines Ward
Hines Edward Ward, Jr.is a retired American football wide receiver, businessman, and television personality. He is the current NBC studio analyst who played 14 seasons for the Pittsburgh Steelers of the National Football League. He played college football at the University of Georgia. The Pittsburgh Steelers selected him in the third round of the 1998 NFL Draft, and he became the team's all-time leader in receptions, receiving yardage and touchdown receptions. Ward was voted MVP of Super Bowl XL, and...
ProfessionFootball Player
Date of Birth8 March 1976
CitySeoul, South Korea
Ben might not have the numbers of Peyton Manning, but it's time that he started being mentioned as one of the great quarterbacks in the game.
Ben has a desire to be the best. You can see that in him. He's going to be a great quarterback for a lot of years.
To me, it's like you put in all this hard work, and we didn't capitalize on it. When you look at it, we had a great year.
We have to stay away from the negative plays. The third-and-longs, those are hard to overcome. We overcame a couple of them last year but last year we were a great team with second-and-short, third-and-short.
I thought it was over when we had the ball at the 2-yard line. Didn't you? Of course, I thought it was over. Everyone did. Then a guy who very rarely fumbles fumbled, and Ben did a heck of a job to tackle the guy. He saved our year. It was a great play. When you're in your goal-line offense, you have all big guys out there and the only guy with any speed is the quarterback.
Just hit it down their throats. They've got great team speed. When we were down 10-7 against them before, we still had a chance in that ballgame to go out and make plays. We just didn't do that.
That was great timing between Ben and I. He threw it to me before I even made my break. That's the timing we're starting to develop. We felt that we had control of the game at that point, but we just couldn't finish it off.
He's a big kid at heart. When the pressure is there, when times are tough and you need to make a big play, he might make a comment where he loosens everyone up and get things going. He's done a great job of handling everything. This year, he's been in every scenario possible - coming from behind, doing the two-minute drill, he was in a shootout. He's experienced all that and he's going to continue to grow.
We knew it was going to go for a touchdown. The great ones don't drop balls in the Super Bowl, and I want to be considered one of the great ones.
We've had to come from behind and he's done that. He's done a great job of handling adversity, calming guys down, making little jokes in the huddle. That's just the way he is.
It was a great run. But it's all about where we are at the end of the season, not how many games we've won in a row. Today, they were the better team. It's disappointing, but we just didn't play well today.
It was a great run. But, for us, it's all about where you end up at the end of the season. We're not really caught up in any streaks or anything.
It was a great run, but, for us, it's all about where we end up for the season, ... If this loss is going to make us better, so be it.
They called a great play at the right time.