| Long ago, the game of football had watch-charm guards, named
after the small and valuable watch charms that once fitted to pocket watches. Vince
Lombardi was a watch-charm guard for Fordham in 1937, and so was television curmudgeon
Andy Rooney for Colgate in ’40. They were about 5-8 and 175 pounds.
An NFL guard nowadays is more like 6-3 and 310 pounds. Remarkably, the game is still
called football.
After the Vikings’ Korey Stringer died of heatstroke, the size of linemen has
become a topic of discussion. Stringer, a very large offensive tackle, was indubitably
overweight, as are many NFL linemen, and so at risk on hot days. "Why do they have to
be so big?" many asked.
A decade ago, Bob Goldman, a researcher in steroid and drug abuse, wrote a book and
presented a paper to the National Academy of Sports Medicine warning that players were
getting too big. Goldman kept statistics and says that 10 years ago, there were 38 players
in the league who weighed 300 pounds or more. Now there are 280. All but one of the
NFL’s 31 teams last season had offensive lines that averaged at least 300 pounds.
What’s wrong with that, we ask?
"A heart set up to support a man weighing 220 is facing a lot more stress
supporting one who weighs 320," Goldman told the Associated Press.
The same thought occurred to Jackie Slater, who was inducted into the Hall of Fame
three days after Stringer died. Slater, an offensive tackle for the Rams for 20 years,
weighed 265 when he began his career in ’76 and 310 when he retired in ’95.
Slater met Stringer at the Pro Bowl in Hawaii last winter and in a recent interview in
The New York Times said, "Korey wasn’t as lean as some of the 300-pounders
there. You take Larry Allen from Dallas, a 300-pounder who has a body fat of 11 percent. I
played at nearly 21 percent.
"With a lot of these guys, it’s not their size. It’s their body fat, way
up there past 30 percent, and the stress that puts on their hearts."
Only four active NFL players have died in 81 years, and Stringer is the only one from
heatstroke. Nothing is going to change, according to NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue. Big
is here to stay.
"That’s the way they’re coming from high school," says Mike
Munchak, the Titans’ OL coach inducted in Canton, Ohio, the same day as Slater.
Munchak played guard for the Houston Oilers at 280 pounds.
Although steroids have gone out of style — forbidden by the NFL — nutritional
supplements, such as the amino acid creatine, are increasingly popular among high school
athletes. Creatine enables them to train longer and harder so they get bigger.
There will be slightly more than one million boys playing high school football this
season, according to the National Federation of State High School Associations.
(That’s almost twice as many as those playing basketball.)
The motivation in high school is to gain that athletic scholarship for college. Once
there, the goal is pro football. The watch-charm guard has gone the way of the Studebaker.
The big shift for offensive linemen came in the ’70s, when the NFL rules were
changed to permit linemen to extend their arms when pass blocking. Cornerbacks also were
no longer allowed to jam receivers at the line of scrimmage.
The goal was to open up the passing game to bring about more touchdowns. So cornerbacks
and receivers became smaller, while the linemen got bigger.
George Young, a college lineman at Bucknell and an NFL OL coach, scout, general manager
and competition committee chairman, explained, "When you couldn’t move your
hands away from your chest, big, heavy guys just weren’t agile enough. You needed
faster footwork. But now, the length of your arms is more important than the quickness of
your feet."
Andy Rooney’s feet were not quite fast enough. In his day, the single-wing
offenses required the guards to pull on most every play and block for the tailback on the
outside — similar to Lombardi’s run-to-daylight plays for the Packers 40 years
ago.
Colgate had a halfback named Bill Geyer, who later played with the Bears, and he ran
the 100-yard dash in 10 seconds. Rooney’s time was more like 20 seconds, he said. On
the sweeps, the guard was to pull out and block the defensive end.
But in a game against Syracuse, Rooney could not get there in time, and Geyer was
tackled repeatedly behind the line of scrimmage.
Rooney, now 81, later wrote, "At halftime, Bill told me what he thought about me,
and we almost came to blows. We won. But I don’t recall him giving me a lot of credit
for the victory."
Bill Wallace has been writing about pro football for half a century and has been with
Pro Football Weekly since its inception in 1967. He is based in Westport, Conn. |
