Secondary Matters

I love blind comparisons. They’re so misleading.

So this time the category is “Hall of Fame defensive backs.” One of these four players is a Hall of Fame defensive back. Can you figure out which one?

Player	Length of career	Times All-Pro	Interceptions/year	Comments
Player A	13 years	Three	5.5	Unsuccessful head coach; successful assistant coach
Player B	12 years	Six	3.9
Player C	Eight years	Three	6.5	Two world championships
Player D	Eight years	Five	6

Not easy, is it? It’s the first player – Dick LeBeau. The other three are Eddie Meador, Bobby Boyd, and Bobby Dillon. None of them are in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. All of them could be.

Did you like that? Cool – let’s do it again. Four more D-backs; one HOFer. Find him.

Player	Length of career	Times All-Pro	Interceptions/year	Comments
Player A	12 years	Five	4.3	Two league championships
Player B	12 years	Seven	4.8	Two league championships
Player C	13 years	Six	3.3
Player D	Six years	Four	6.9	One league championship

How’d you do on that one? The HOFer is player C – Roger Werhli. The other three are Jimmy Patton, Johnny Robinson, and Don Doll – not a HOFer in the bunch.

It’s hard to sort out the Hall of Famers among ‘50s and ‘60s D-backs. Interception numbers are all over the place because of the nature of the passing game during those years. Passing offenses were changing every year, and pass defenses were struggling (or, in the case of the Lions, not struggling at all) to keep up. Quarterbacks lacked the bull’s-eye accuracy of Drew Brees or Aaron Rodgers, for many reasons. QBs were three or four inches shorter on average. Frankie Albert was 5’10”; Eddie LeBaron, 5’9”. HOFers like Johnny Unitas, Y.A. Tittle, and Bart Starr were right around six feet even when measured with official NFL yardsticks. There was more variance in the texture and inflation of balls. More games were played on natural turf, in less-than-optimal field conditions. Fewer receivers went out on most passing plays. Passes were longer; completed passes went for an average of 14 yards in 1949, versus 11 yards today. Rules were more relaxed on defensive-back contact with receivers. And finally, quarterbacks weren’t groomed and schooled from second grade on on optimum elbow angle and foot placement and multiple reads. George Blanda was trying to do Tom Brady stuff, but he wasn’t looking off receivers or stepping into his throws. Nothing about playing the modern quarterback position was baked into his DNA – just the opposite, in fact. Everything about the passing game was much more improvised – headed toward the modern level of sophisticated planning and analysis no question, but in no ways there yet.

Not that defenses had it all over offenses in the passing game. There were no designated pass rushers, so Hawg Hanner was left out there to run down Otto Graham. Nickel and dime defenses didn’t even exist on chalkboards, and that left Bobby Mitchell isolated on Galen Fiss. Safeties were still duck-plucking centerfielders in the Bob Waterfield/Don Hutson/Sammy Baugh mold, lacking the speed to run with receivers – and if receivers in the ‘50s had one thing in common with modern receivers, it’s speed relative to the competition. It doesn’t matter whether Tom Fears could beat Brandon Browner in a 40-yard dash. What matters is whether Tom Fears could beat Don Paul – and he most definitely could.

As with so many other things, progress was mitigated by reactionary thinking and offensive progress was matched by defensive progress. The result was small improvements in offensive performance, but nothing like what could have happened had coaches seen the lightning in the bottle.

Contrast that with line play. A lineman’s role changed only incrementally through the 1950s. Blocking was still blocking; it meant little for a lineman to step back and pass-block one-third of the time as opposed to drive-blocking all the time. There are so many more linemen from the 1950s in the Hall of Fame as opposed to skill-position players (except for quarterbacks, which wind up enshrined out of all proportion) in part because what they had to do was more refined and better defined than what ends and defensive backs had to do. When you’re doing something that generations before you have done, and honed, and perfected, you’re going to be better at it than someone who’s basically figuring things out on the fly. The horse-drawn carriage of 1892 was naturally a more advanced carriage than the automobile of 1892 was an advanced auto. They’d had 20 centuries to get the kinks out.

Given all that, who were the truly great D-backs of the period? Make that D-back: Emlen Tunnell intercepted 74 passes from 1949-60, and no one else comes close. No. 2 is a semi-dead heat among Night Train Lane (5.8 passes intercepted/year from 1952-58; four-time All-Pro), Jack Christiansen (5.1 INTs/year, five-time All-Pro), Jack Butler (5.8 INTs/year, four-time All-Pro), and Bobby Dillon (6 INTs/year, five-time All-Pro). There are intangibles to all four – Lane was a feared tackler, Christiansen a feared returner, Butler and Dillon one-man defenses – but no single player is a head-and-shoulders-above-the-rest type. They’re all simply varying degrees of tall.

To be honest, there aren’t a lot of transcendental D-backs out there, perhaps because the position is so reactive. The cases you can make for Ronnie Lott, Deion Sanders, Mel Renfro, and Rod Woodson aren’t strong. The only D-back that sticks out a little is Larry Wilson, and wouldn’t you know: He took a reactive position and made it aggressive through the full-scale employment of the safety blitz.

None of this really addresses the issue at hand, namely: Why isn’t Bobby Dillon (and contemporaries like Jimmy Patton, Don Paul, and Don Doll) in the Pro Football Hall of Fame? There’s nothing in the research to answer that question, but there is a parallel to be found in – you guessed it – the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame.

To get to that point, let's play the misleading-comparison game again and look at the stats of two rock-‘n’-roll artists from the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. You tell me which one is the HOFer. (Big honking hint: It’s the one with the worse stats.)

	Top-40 singles	No. 1 singles	No. 1s written for other artists	RnRHOFer connection
Artist A	16	None	Three	Rolling Stones
Artist B	24	Nine	Five-plus	Elton John

Could you guess the names? Artist B is Neil Sedaka; Artist A is Gene Pitney.

I’m not a Neil Sedaka fan by any means, but I can’t understand why voters have turned a blind eye to Sedaka while enshrining someone who’s essentially an inferior Sedaka. Hey, it’s not like Pitney eclipses Sedaka in the artistic-integrity department; “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” is just as sappy and contrived in its own way as “Happy Birthday Sweet 16,” but Sedaka’s song has a beat, and you can dance to it, Dick.

The only only difference between Pitney and Sedaka is that Sedaka has the perception of being soft, and perish the thought that the RnRHOF would induct someone soft, but when you find the hard edges on Pitney, ABBA, the Bee Gees, or Donovan, let me know.

It’s lesson time, and I guess the lesson in all this is not to demand consistency when it comes to Hall of Fame voting. Though all we have is the numbers much of the time, the evidence says we can’t go on numbers alone; we have to go on something else. Problem is, no one can say for sure what that something else is.