Football coaches relentlessly drill execution, believing perfect practice yields perfect Sunday results. Yet one of the most iconic plays in Pittsburgh Steelers history, the game-winning touchdown pass from Ben Roethlisberger to Santonio Holmes in Super Bowl XLIII, defied that logic entirely.
On a recent episode of Roethlisberger's podcast, "Footbahlin with Ben Roethlisberger," the two former teammates reminisced about the events that preceded that iconic pass. Leading up to the championship game in Tampa, the duo failed to complete the corner pass every single time they ran it.
What started as frustration quickly evolved into an unspoken team superstition. The execution was so consistently flawed in practice that wide receiver coach Randy Fichtner
stepped in to ease the tension.
"Randy had told us at one point, 'All right, look, I don't need you guys to catch this ball cuz if you can't catch it now, don't worry about it. We just going to call this play,'" Holmes recalled.
Rather than stressing over the misses, Roethlisberger and Holmes embraced the anomaly as a lighthearted running joke.
"I do remember like us saying like, let's just never complete it until we need it or something, something so stupid," Roethlisberger said.
The bizarre trend reached its peak during the team's final practice before facing the Arizona Cardinals. Running their final red-zone rep before stepping into victory formation, Roethlisberger uncorked the corner pass one last time.
"Do you remember throwing that pass to me in the corner of the end zone the last practice and I put my hands up like this, and you threw the ball right through my arms?" Holmes asked. "I stood right there. You threw the ball right through it. I walked away. We called victory formation and we walked away and that was the last play that we ran at Super Bowl in Tampa."
Only 42 seconds remained on the clock when they finally called the play in real time. As Roethlisberger pointed out, the ball didn’t go through his hands that final time. The streak broke at the ultimate moment, proving that superstition sometimes trumps practice perfection.
This article originally appeared on Steelers Wire: Big Ben and Santonio Holmes reveal bizarre Super Bowl practice secret
