Rams on all-time top 100 NFL players list (Deacon is 16)

from The NFL 100: The Athletic’s pursuit of the best players in football history

https://theathletic.com/2685622/2021/08/10/the-nfl-100-the-athletics-pursuit-of-the-best-players-in-football-history/?source=dailyemail&campaign=601983

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At No. 70, Marshall Faulk, ‘a highlight waiting to happen,’ redefined the running back position

Marshall Faulk was almost too talented for his own good.

As a senior at George Washington Carver High School in New Orleans, he was so proficient on the football field, coach Wayne Reese employed him like a latter-day Taysom Hill. Faulk played cornerback, running back, quarterback and receiver. He also punted, returned punts and kickoffs, and was the place holder on extra points and field goals. His teammates called him “The 48-Minute Man” because he never came off the field.

Faulk’s multi-dimensionality helped the Rams to respectability on the field. But it undermined his own cause off it. He was left off the Times-Picayune’s 1990 All-Metro team as a senior largely because he failed to amass enough statistics in any one area to distinguish himself against the competition. (The oversight was so egregious the paper’s sports editor felt compelled to write an impassioned mea culpa to Faulk in 2011.)

College coaches also were unsure about Faulk’s best fit as a prospect. They knew he could play. They just weren’t sure where. Because of his athleticism and relatively slight 5-10, 180-pound frame, most major schools recruited him to play cornerback. But San Diego State, which had St. Rose, La., native Curtis Johnson on its staff as lead recruiter, liked him as a running back. So Faulk turned down blue bloods such as LSU, Miami, Nebraska and Texas A&M to head across the country and join Coach Al Luginbill’s high-flying offense.

For a teenager from the Desire Housing Complex in New Orleans’ impoverished Ninth Ward, it was a bold move. Faulk worked odd jobs to help his mother make ends meet for her six children. He sold popcorn at the Superdome as a teenager to get into Saints home games for free. When he left for San Diego State, it was the first time he’d ever been out of Louisiana or flown on a plane.

“It was easy to underestimate Marshall,” said Johnson, who coached the Aztecs wide receivers at the time. “He was this little, short, dumpy kid with narrow shoulders, coming out of Carver High School, which didn’t have a very good team at the time. But when you watched the film, you realized he could play. Marshall was a phenomenal athlete, and he could do everything. And he knew exactly what he wanted to do. He was smart and confident in his abilities.”

It didn’t take long for Faulk to make an impact at San Diego State. In the second game of his college career, starter T.C. Wright bruised his thigh late in the first quarter against Pacific. The backup – Wayne Pittman – couldn’t find his helmet on the sideline. So Faulk, who had fumbled twice in his college debut against Long Beach State, got the call. He answered by rushing for a then-NCAA-record 386 yards and seven touchdowns on 37 carries.

Faulk’s first carry came with less than four minutes left in the first quarter. By the end of the quarter, he had three carries for 12 yards. But he carried 13 times for 117 yards in the second quarter, 11 times for 194 yards in the third and 10 times for 63 yards in the fourth.

“No one expected something like that,” Johnson said. “The rest was history.”

Faulk was on everyone’s radar. And no one questioned his ability to play running back.

He went on to record one of the most impressive freshman seasons in college football history. He rushed for 1,429 yards and a 7.1-yards-per-carry average, while finishing ninth in the Heisman Trophy race. He rushed for 1,630 yards as a sophomore and finished second in the Heisman race to Miami quarterback Gino Torretta. As a junior, he rushed for 1,530 yards, while adding 47 receptions for 644 yards. The Indianapolis Colts made him the No. 2 pick in the 1994 NFL Draft.

“Marshall was one of the smartest players I’ve ever coached,” said New Orleans Saints coach Sean Payton, who served as Faulk’s position coach during his sophomore and junior seasons at SDSU. “And he knew not only offensive football, but also the defensive protections. He knew the quarterback play. He studied it hard.”

In the NFL, Faulk’s versatility, once a hindrance, became his calling card.

During his 12-year NFL career with the Colts and St. Louis Rams, Faulk redefined the running back position and became the archetype for modern-day backs such as Alvin Kamara and Christian McCaffrey. With his cat-quick elusiveness and sprinter’s speed, Faulk routinely made defenders look silly in the open field. Yet, he also had the power and toughness to run between the tackles, as evidenced by his 91 career red-zone touchdowns. He caught passes out of the backfield long before it became the norm for NFL backs. And he could pass protect like a sixth lineman.

“I don’t think there was anyone better in the all-around game,” said longtime NFL personnel executive Gil Brandt. “Marshall is a Hall of Fame running back. But if you had lined him up at wide receiver for his career, he would have caught 1,000 passes. He would have been a Hall of Fame wide receiver.”

Faulk was so smart, the Colts considered him a coach on the field. When Indianapolis selected Peyton Manning with the No. 1 overall pick in the 1998 draft, Faulk helped ease the rookie’s transition to the NFL by teaching him the playbook.

“Marshall’s ability to read defenses was as good as any quarterback,” Manning said. “He was a tremendous presence for me, and I always will be grateful to him for helping me that year. I loved watching him play, and there will never be another like him.”

Faulk’s career went to another level after the Colts traded him to St. Louis in 1999. With the Rams, he joined forces with quarterback Kurt Warner, receivers Isaac Bruce and Tory Holt and offensive coordinator Mike Martz to form the “Greatest Show on Turf” offense, which took the league by storm in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

The results were incredible: an NFL record three straight seasons with 500-plus points, two Super Bowl appearances in three seasons and an improbable Super Bowl title in Faulk’s first season in St. Louis. Warner and Faulk combined to win the league’s MVP award three consecutive years: Warner in 1999 and 2001; Faulk in 2000.

But opponents would tell you that Faulk was the guy they worried about the most.

Before facing the Rams in Super Bowl XXXVI, New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick called Faulk “the hardest player to match up against” in the NFL.

“When I think back to when he was in Indianapolis, they would split him out a lot, and I thought he was better than their other receivers,” Belichick said. “For him to be the best wide receiver and the best running back really puts you in a bind defensively.”

In an effort to try to combat Faulk, opponents would regularly change their defensive game plans and personnel when they played the Rams.

“Once you found out what the matchups were, you could make an adjustment on the sideline with Marshall and he could take care of that immediately,” Martz said. “In fact, he’d come to the sideline and understand it and say, `Hey, here’s what they’re doing. How about this?’ Pretty unusual.”

Warner calls Faulk “the most complete player I’ve ever been around.” Faulk was so smart and so talented Warner believes he could have played quarterback in the NFL if given the chance.

“He was a highlight waiting to happen,” Warner said. “He could do everything. Mentally, he was the sharpest player that I’ve ever been around.”

Faulk will go down in history as one of the most multi-talented players in league history. He is the only NFL player with at least 12,000 yards rushing and 6,000 yards receiving. He caught more passes in his career (767) than 19 Hall of Fame wide receivers.

“He could block, he could run inside, he could run outside, and he could catch the football,” Hall of Fame coach Tony Dungy said. “He was a versatile, talented player and a very cerebral guy, as well. Marshall did everything. He just was a complete football player.”

Faulk retired in 2007 and was a first-ballot inductee to the Hall of Fame in 2011. His career accomplishments speak to his multi-dimensional game:

Faulk and Jim Brown are the only backs in NFL history to average more than 5 yards a carry over three consecutive seasons.
Among backs, Faulk has the most receiving yards (6,875) in NFL history and the second-most receptions (767).
Faulk and Roger Craig are the only backs in NFL history to have 1,000 yards rushing and 1,000 yards receiving in the same season.
Only four players in NFL history produced more yards from scrimmage than Faulk.
Not bad for a kid from New Orleans’ Ninth Ward who couldn’t even make the All-Metro team in high school.

“My father told me this: If you are ever traveling on a road and there are no speed bumps, you are headed for a dead end,” Faulk said. “I didn’t make the All-Metro team, so I went all the way to San Diego State to become the best player in the country and the No. 2 pick in the draft. Life is a challenge. God gave me talent. Football gave me an opportunity. I made the commitment.”

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At No. 50, Dick ‘Night Train’ Lane’s Hall of Fame path had improbable origins

For a man who would go on to enjoy a transcendent career and later be enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame, Dick “Night Train” Lane’s NFL career could not have begun in a more unremarkable manner.

After one season of junior-college ball and four years in the Army, Lane found himself working in a California aircraft factory during the Korean War. Let’s just say the job wasn’t what he thought it’d be.

“They told me I’d be a filer,” Lane once said. “I thought they meant a file clerk in an office. I was a filer, all right. I filed big sheets of metal into bins with oil dripping off the metal onto me.”

So unfulfilled was Lane with his new employment, he went looking for alternatives. Among them, a return to football. Convinced to give him a shot based on his small-college resume and his army club-team experience, the Los Angeles Rams granted Lane a tryout with no guarantees.

Soon, one of the most improbable starts to a career in NFL history commenced. Lane went on to become a star by the end of his rookie season in 1952, setting a league single-season record that still stands with 14 interceptions in a 12-game season.

He would compile 68 career interceptions (fourth all time) with the Rams, Cardinals and Lions, become a feared tackler and a seven-time Pro Bowl selection.

He impacted games, whether by returning his many interceptions for chunks of yardage, brutally upending ball carriers or, oftentimes, with his mere presence.

As Packers coach Vince Lombardi told his quarterback, Bart Starr, during Lane’s years with the Lions, “Don’t throw anywhere near him. He’s the best there is.”

Patriots coach Bill Belichick, describing Lane’s game during NFL Network’s all-time team unveiling in 2019, said of Lane, “He was a great tackler. He usually played over on the left side, left cornerback. You didn’t really want to run over there, especially outside.”

Just imagine had Lane been actually hired to, well, file. The NFL record books might look vastly different.

Everything about Lane’s story is utterly implausible, so much so that his status as one of the greatest undrafted players in history is arguably not the most notable part of his journey.

To truly convey the unlikely nature of his path, you must begin with Lane’s earliest years.

Lane, who died in 2002 at 73, was abandoned in a trash heap at 3 months old by his biological mother. Ella Lane, a widow with two children, heard the child’s cries and went over to investigate. He was hers from then on. She adopted the boy and raised him.

She fostered a child who grew to become a player who showed the NFL a breed of defender it had rarely seen. Truth is, Lane is the kind of player who theoretically could compete today.

Given the importance of cornerbacks in the modern NFL, having a player like Lane would be a coach’s dream in 2021. He was a multidimensional player who could smother receivers, but he also played with anticipation, showing an ability to instinctively feel where quarterbacks would throw before they actually did. That skill would have served him well in a league now dominated by the quick passing game.

He also was a physical player who reveled in defending the run. And when he tackled you, he did it with a certain level of violence. His signature tackling technique was so unique that it gained a nickname of its own, the “Night Train Necktie.” Lane would famously use his gangly arms to wrap ball carriers around the shoulders and slam them to the ground. His brand of takedown was not the timid tackling you might associate with some cornerbacks.

Lane was quite proud of that.

“My objective is to stop the guy before he gains another inch,” he once said. “I’m usually dealing with ends who are trying to catch passes, and if I hit them in the legs they may fall forward for a first down. There is nothing I hate worse than a first down.”

Another area where Lane literally measures up to today’s premier corners is in his size. He stood 6-foot-1 and weighed around 200 pounds, a profile that certainly would be tantalizing to current teams on a draft board.

“This is a big, physical corner,” Belichick said. “A forerunner to Mel Blount and Rod Woodson.”

Packers Hall of Fame cornerback Herb Adderley once described Lane like this: “I’ve never seen a defensive back hit like him. I mean, take them down, whether it be Jim Brown or Jim Taylor.”

The Rams initially viewed Lane as a receiver in his first training camp with the team. But when he failed to make a mark there, they tried him on defense.

Lane was a natural. His length was a particularly key attribute.

“In a big pileup once, I reached out and grabbed somebody’s ankle,” Lane told the New York Times in 1974. “It happened to be the ball carrier. Another time I got flipped up in the air, but in my somersault, I made a tackle. The coach, Joe Stydahar, came running out on the field, yelling, ‘That’s the kind of player I want!’”

No retrospective on Lane would be complete without a refresher on the origin of his nickname. It stems from Lane’s relationship with Rams teammate Tom Fears, who initially tutored Lane as a receiver during his first camp.

“Fears liked to play records, and his favorite was ‘Night Train,’” Lane once said. “Every day I’d be going to his room and he’d be playing it. He roomed with a guy named Ben Sheets, and whenever I’d walk into the room, Sheets would say, ‘Here comes Night Train.’ He started calling me that, and it stuck.”

The song was a big band jazz hit by Buddy Morrow released in 1952 that sold more than a million copies.

When you think about it, Lane’s nickname was quite fitting. It was assigned because of Lane’s connection to the work of a particular artist, and it ended up being attached to a player who brought a level of artistry to his game.

Watching Lane pluck footballs from the air, run with long strides toward the end zone or employ the perfect angle to take down a runner could only be described as art.

Had Lane been content to hang around that factory filing sheets of metal, had he not had the nerve to think he could do the unthinkable, NFL fans would have been robbed of watching one of the best players of all time.

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At No. 40, Eric Dickerson was ‘the original freak’ running back with the Rams and Colts

Viola Dickerson was Eric Dickerson’s great-great aunt and adoptive mother, and she was the valedictorian of her high school class in Sealy, Texas. Despite her academic accomplishments, she was like so many Black women in her place and time; she went on to clean houses for White people on the other side of the tracks, never fulfilling her promise, never earning what she believed she was worth.

Eric, her adopted son — his biological mother, Helen Johnson, had him at 15 and was more of an older sister than a mother — saw all of that and it informed his behavior and his approach to the business of football as his gifts as a running back opened up a whole new world to him.

“(Viola) grew up in the segregated South, and she was a brilliant woman, but the only job she could get was cleaning houses on the White side of town,” said Greg Hanlon, the co-author of “Watch My Smoke: The Eric Dickerson Story,” which will be published in 2022. “And it always grated on Eric because he knew how smart and proud his mom was. To watch her bust her hump day in and day out, say ‘Yes, sir,’ and ‘Yes, ma’am,’ to White men and women who were significantly younger than her, that always stuck in his craw. He recognized the unfairness of the situation, how White people were always getting over on Black people, and that stayed with him even when he found himself in a position where he could make a lot of money playing football.”

There are two Eric Dickerson stories to be told here.

One focuses on his otherworldly rushing skills, which landed him in the Hall of Fame.

The other is the never-ending contract disputes that marked — some would say sullied — his marvelous career, his tenures with the Rams and Colts ending because of disagreements over money and, in Dickerson’s mind, basic fairness.

“He was always called a malcontent,” Hanlon said. (Dickerson declined an opportunity to speak for this story.) “He was called an ingrate, and worse. All these words that were used, they were kind of coded and had the same racial undertones. ‘Just shut up and dribble,’ right? ‘Just shut up and run.’ But he felt he was standing up for what he felt was fair. A good example is the SMU scandal, where he is commonly portrayed as representing the biggest excesses of those SMU teams and it was said he took a pay cut when he got to the pros. Nothing could be further from the truth. The amount of money he made for SMU versus the nominal favors, the idea he was being portrayed as this spoiled athlete, it’s completely backwards.

“As he said in our book, the real scandal wasn’t how much money he was making but how little.”

Hanlon continued.

“During his entire career, there was a vague aura or negativity surrounding him, propagated by the media, in large part,” he said. “But when you read this book and see his situation through a more enlightened, contemporary lens, the reader will see he was completely reasonable about everything he was criticized for. He was just asserting his rights and doing something that is now commonplace.

“But you’ve got to look at it in context: This was the 1980s, an age of exploding sports salaries. And when guys asked for more money, especially Black athletes, it was not looked at kindly by the establishment — White sports ownership, White sports management, White sports media. And a largely White fan base. We’re talking here about Orange County, Calif., (where he played for the Rams) and Indianapolis. So he got portrayed as a malcontent, a locker room lawyer, ‘Eric the Ingrate.’ Fact is, this guy was drastically underpaid his entire career. And he spoke up about it, as he should have.”

On the field, Dickerson had few rivals. To start, he looked different; he wore a neck collar, normally reserved for linebackers, which he got from old SMU teammate Craig James. He wore rec specs — he had myopia — because contact lenses kept popping out. In an era when players were wearing as few pads as possible, Dickerson wore the biggest, boxiest pads imaginable, looking like a cross between a hockey goalie and the Michelin Man. And that running style; has anybody ever had Dickerson’s almost-regal gait, his ability to get his pads low through the hole and then explode into space running straight up like an Olympic sprinter? He was a long strider, someone who made the difficult look perfunctory. He was the personification of athletic grace.

“I blocked for 37 different running backs,” said Jackie Slater, the Hall of Fame offensive lineman for the Rams, during his Hall of Fame introduction of Dickerson. “And you know, all these guys had unique talents. They had a gift that kept them in the league. You know, it could have been their vision, it could have been their quickness, their power or their speed. And most of these guys kept their jobs because of one or two of these talents.

“But in my opinion, Eric Dickerson was the original freak in that he possessed all of these, and the greatest of them was his speed. You know, they say speed judges speed better than people who don’t have it, and I’ve found that to be true. We were playing the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in Tampa and I remember we ran the 47-Gap. And I kicked out on a guy and rolled around, and all I could see was two defensive backs with an angle on him. All they had to do was keep running. Close right in on him. But, you know, speed judges speed better than people who don’t have it, and they adjusted those angles, and they tried to head him off at the pass. But they couldn’t head him off at the pass. Forty-two yards later, he went into the end zone untouched. I’m telling you, the man was great.”

The production was undeniable: He set rookie records for most rushing attempts, most rushing yards and most touchdown runs. His second season, he set the single-season rushing record with 2,105 yards. In fact, Dickerson had more rushing yards than the Rams’ quarterback, Jeff Kemp, had passing yards that year. He reached 10,000 rushing yards faster than any other back in history, doing so in 91 games, faster than Jim Brown, Barry Sanders and Emmitt Smith, among others. Even after a substandard third season in 1985, Dickerson went for 248 yards in a playoff game against the Cowboys. One year later, in 1986, Dickerson rebounded with 1,821 rushing yards.

But there was trouble beneath the surface. Contract discussions, which began all the way back in 1985, had become extremely contentious by 1987. The Rams had enough of the give-and-take, the holdouts, ultimately executing a three-way deal with the Colts to send Dickerson to Indy.

“I remember the feeling we had in the locker room after we made the trade,” said Colts Ring of Fame wide receiver Bill Brooks, who played in Indianapolis from 1986-92. “It was a sign that Jim (Irsay, the owner and then-GM) was committed to putting a winning team together. Bringing Eric in, a big name and a big talent like him, it put us on the map as a franchise and put us in a position to reach the playoffs. Remember, we’d just moved to Indy a few years earlier, so we were in our infancy at that time. I felt like Eric brought big-time football to Indianapolis.”

There were some good moments in Indianapolis — a playoff appearance in 1987 — and one year later, Indy had a Monday night moment on the national stage, beating the Broncos 55-23 with Dickerson scoring four touchdowns on Halloween night. But slowly, Dickerson’s production dimmed and the constant demands for better pay became tiresome. Finally, in April 1992, the Colts traded him to the Raiders for a fourth- and an eighth-round pick.

“He’s still sad about the way things went down (in Los Angeles) because he loves, loves, loves L.A. and he loved his Rams teammates and felt they were this close to joining the 49ers and Giants as a real powerhouse,” Hanlon said. “He considers himself an L.A. guy through and through — the energy, the diversity, the fun it was. He loved so many things about being a Ram, but it didn’t work out with team management.

“Indy? He didn’t have those same feelings. There were things about his experience in Indy that really hurt him and still hurt him to this day. In the book, he talks about a high-ranking team official telling a joke using the n-word as kind of a power play to sort of show the players what they could get away with and how little recourse they had. Once, when he was having contract issues, he saw a banner in the Hoosier Dome that showed him as a baby with a 29 jersey, holding fried chicken and a watermelon.

“He had a cousin who lived there at the time and this cousin called Eric to tell him to turn on the TV, so he did and what he saw was a Klan rally in Market Square and the TV reporters are treating it like some kind of American Legion group. That’s really seared into his consciousness.”

The experience of his mother informed his actions throughout his football life. He would not accept a penny less than he felt he was worth. And he got castigated for that.

“A lot of people passively consumed the media depiction of him, and it’s not true,” Hanlon said. “He’s a very thoughtful, interesting, warm, generous man. It’s a shame much of his career was spent with the press trashing him for daring to stand up for himself.

“But here’s the thing: He’s not bitter because he thinks he was in the right. He doesn’t have any regrets. He doesn’t.”

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