Andy Russell, the standout linebacker who was integral to the Pittsburgh Steelers’ evolution from perennial losers to champions, has died. He was 82.
The team confirmed Russell’s death on Saturday. There was no immediate word on the cause or location of death.
A 16th-round pick in the 1963 draft, Russell won two Super Bowls during a 12-year NFL career interrupted by a two-year stint in the Army. Russell was team captain for 10 years and was named to the Pro Bowl seven times. His teammates named Russell the club’s Most Valuable Player in 1971, a season that included future Hall of Famers Joe Greene, Mel Blount, Jack Ham and Terry Bradshaw on the roster.
“Andy was part of the foundation of the great Steelers teams of the 1970s,” Steelers president Art Rooney II said in a rack. “He was one of the few players that Coach Chuck Noll kept on the team after he became our head coach in 1969. Andy was the team captain and his leadership was a crucial part of Coach Noll’s development of the 1970s Steelers, who paved the way to four Super Bowl championships.”
Both stubborn and durable, Russell and his number 34 were one of the few bright spots on a string of Steeler teams that finished near the bottom of the league during the early part of his career.
That changed in 1969 when Noll took over as head coach.
“(Noll) said, ‘You’re good people. You will be good citizens. Unfortunately, you can’t run fast enough or jump high enough, and I’ll have to replace most of you,” Russell told Pittsburgh Quarterly in 2006.
Just not Russell, who became one of the cornerstones of a defense that helped the franchise win four Super Bowls in the 1970s. Russell toiled in anonymity, putting together a resume that his teammates consider worthy of the Hall of Fame.
“It would have been easy for (Andy) to give up or get sucked into the mediocrity he saw all around him, but he refused to do so,” wrote Ham, who played alongside Russell for six seasons. “That attitude was evident to me from my first day of practice until Andy’s last game with the Steelers.”
Russell had 38 sacks and 18 interceptions during the regular season and added three sacks and a pick during 11 playoff games, two of which ended with the Steelers hoisting the Lombardi Trophy as Super Bowl champions.
A two-way star during his collegiate career at Missouri, Russell was discouraged from playing in the NFL by his father, who told him it would be an “embarrassment to the Russell family” if Andy went to the NFL.
Russell followed his father’s orders. When NFL teams sent him a questionnaire asking if he wanted to play professional football, Russell checked the ‘no’ box.
The only team that didn’t send him a survey was the Steelers, who drafted the 6-foot-4, 225-pound Russell with the 220th pick and then offered him a $12,000 contract and a $3,000 signing bonus.
Russell’s original plan was to play one season for the money and then get an MBA. An injury to linebacker John Reger in the season opener against Philadelphia forced Russell into the lineup to fill in and never left.
“You’re talking about luck,” Russell said. “If that hadn’t happened, I would have played for a year, gotten my MBA and gone into business. I just had a huge breakthrough.”
Russell took a break after his rookie year and missed the 1964 and 1965 seasons while serving the military deployment required as an ROTC member.
When he returned, the Steelers were still mired in the standings, winning a total of eleven games over the next three seasons, with Russell’s great play often getting lost amid all the losing. Indeed, he achieved his goal, earning an MBA in finance in 1967 and founding a series of companies, including an investment firm with ties to Wall Street, and an investment bank.
Russell’s football fortunes changed when Noll came on board. The Steelers drafted Ham in 1971 and future Hall of Famer Jack Lambert in 1974, with the trio forming one of the greatest linebacking groups in NFL history. Pittsburgh won their first two Super Bowls following the 1974 and 1975 seasons.
Russell retired after the Steelers lost to Oakland in the 1976 AFC championship game. He had two sacks in a divisional round win over Baltimore.
Charles Andrew “Andy” Russell was born on October 29, 1941 in Detroit. He was a standout at Ladue Horton Watkins High in suburban St. Louis, Missouri, in the late 1950s before earning three letters at Missouri from 1960 to 1962, where he played both running back and linebacker.
After retiring, Russell wrote three books about his career and was an avid climber. He reached all 54 peaks in Colorado that reach heights of at least 13,000 feet. He remained active in the Pittsburgh community and launched the Andy Russell Charitable Foundationthat supported a variety of local charities in western Pennsylvania.
Russell, a member of the Steelers Hall of Honor’s first class of 2017, is survived by his wife Cindy, two children and seven grandchildren.