GLENDALE, Ariz. — The Super Bowl champs will have their star quarterback and the Arizona Cardinals will be without their big-name rookie for their preseason opener Saturday.

Amid the fanfare of the grand opening of Cardinals Stadium, Ben Roethlisberger will be at the controls of the Pittsburgh Steelers offense, two months after sustaining serious head and facial injuries in a motorcycle crash.

"My goal was to get out there and show everybody I was ready to go out and play," Roethlisberger said. "We'll see what happens."

Kurt Warner and the rest of the Cardinals' top offensive players probably will play no more than one quarter, then give way to backups. But there will be no Matt Leinart, who remains away from the team in a holdout, the lone first-round pick from this year's draft yet to sign.

That means third-year pro John Navarre will take over when Warner leaves the field.

Roethlisberger's time on the field will be brief.

"Ben will start and he will play for a short period of time, and I will leave it at that," coach Bill Cowher said.

The rest of the starters will go a series or two.

"Hopefully, we'll look crisp and get a chance to look at some of the younger players," Cowher said.

The game will mark the Cardinals debut of running back Edgerrin James, the team's big offseason free agent acquisition. James would just as soon sit this one out as he might have done with his former team, but as Arizona coach Dennis Green said, "This isn't Indianapolis."

"I've said it over and over, I don't really care to play," James said, "but if that's what they want me to do, that's what I'll do."

James is supposed to add some much-needed ground production to a team that almost exclusively moved the ball through the air to the standout receiving tandem of Anquan Boldin and Larry Fitzgerald.

Boldin sat out a couple of days of practice at the team's training camp in Flagstaff this week, but will play Saturday, Green said.

While the teams will look for production from their starters, the real emphasis will be on sorting out the talent among the backups who will play the bulk of the contest.

"We don't have a game plan per se," linebacker Clark Haggans said. "It's not like we're practicing all week for Arizona. But we have to get prepared, and we take an approach that we would take any game we play. I get ready the same way, go through the same routine I go through in the locker room, and I know a lot of the guys do the same thing."