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
We pulled it out of our old bag of tricks.
We feel like we can do whatever we have to do, and whenever we have to do it, to win. But there's not a lot of mystery to how we like to play. Get a lead and run the football.
We liked our chances against No. 22. He's a great, talented kid. He's just young and inexperienced and we wanted to exploit that. He's going to be good, but (Sunday), we wanted to do what we needed to do (against him).
We liked our chances against No. 22. He's a great, talented kid, just young and inexperienced, so we wanted to see if we could exploit that.
We dominated ... and we still lost. Hard to forget that one.
We don't feel like we're favored. We're not going to change. We're still playing like a team with desperation.
We were desperate. It's a one-game season every week for us. We've got to play like it's the playoffs, because we don't have a lot of room for error.
We didn't want to go through this by choice. That is how it went. Last year, we were a No. 1 seed. This year, we had to win our final four games just to get here. So we've been on a playoff mentality the last four weeks of the regular season. It's win or go home, so we've gotten used to playing with pressure.
We beat the stuffing out of them, but turned the ball over too many times. (It was) frustrating because they didn't win the game. We lost the game. We did everything to lose the game and we did that. We shot ourselves in the foot.
This year, there was no expectation. We were the sixth seed. Nobody expected much out of us.
When I signed the deal, I wasn't a Pro Bowl player, ... To go to four straight Pro Bowls, you deserve some type of raise. They said, 'Come into camp and we'll continue negotiations,' and that's why I'm here.
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 thought we could take some shots in the air. We're an experienced team and we took our chances.
We tried to come out and punch them in the mouth early. And they punched right back. They played an excellent game. They can win a lot of ways.