Faneca’s Crybabby Good-Bye Tour Continues

At first I was as mad as everyone else that the Steelers were not making a huge push to try and get together with guard Alan Faneca to get him locked up for the rest of his Steelers career.  How could the team let such a huge part of their offensive line and such a classy player for all those years just slip away.  When things got ugly in the offseason, I still was on the fence about who was right and who was wrong.  But as more and more time has passed, I am now starting to shift my focus on being on the side of the team, meaning that it’s time to put all the boo-hooing for Faneca to rest.

What makes me even more irked about this whole thing is the national perspective that the Steelers are being cheap, or that they are going to regret not re-signing Faenca and will let him go free agency after the 2007 season.  How many times in the last 15 years or so have the Steelers lost a player, and that player has gone on to a career that has been basically a bust somewhere else.  Joey Porter – are you listening?  Already Porter, who many said was not going be able to be replaced, is on the shelf with the Dolphins after having right knee surgery last Tuesday.  Sure he’ll be back, but I will bet you right now that he’s not even close to the player he was in Pittsburgh.

The names are countless – Jerrol Williams, Greg Lloyd, Rod Woodson, Levon Kirkland, Eric Green, Neil O’Donnell, Barry Foster, Bam Morris, Jeff Graham, Donald Evans, Kordell Stewart, and on and on and on.  All these players had something in common – they were good with the Steelers – and on another team were basically marginal players at best.  So now Faneca is going out and already giving emotional interviews about this being the “last time” for events that are taking place at training camp.  Take a check at his quote:

“Knowing the end is inevitable, it does get you thinking about things,” Faneca said on Monday.  “It’s the last time for this, it’s the last time for that. Thinking that I have X number of home games left … thing like that. I try to stay off that road. I try to stay focused. But yeah, people are starting to remind me that this is it. Someone asked me about this being my last camp at St. Vincent. Yeah, it is. I’ll miss St. Vincent … except for that hill over there.”

Well Alan, whose fault really is it that “this is it”?  I am sure that with the millions upon millions of dollars you already made, the Steelers would be more than happy to give you at the very least a fair deal to stick around after 2007.  But nooooooo, you want to break the bank and be greedy about it.  So go ahead, give your little emotional speeches to the media, tell everyone how you’ve been done wrong, let everyone know how tough life is when you make millions of dollars to play a game.

I for one am already sick of hearing about it.  Despite the fact that the Steelers would have had a big hole at that spot, maybe the team SHOULD have traded Faenca to his daddy (Russ Grimm) over in Arizona.  I would have loved to have seen how fast that marriage would have lasted and how long it would have been before he would have complained there.  So go ahead Alan, keep talkin about how this year is going to be so emotional since you have countless times stated it would be your last.  I for one am thinking let’s move on without him already, so we don’t have to hear anymore sob stories the rest of 2007.