Raiders Kept Shelling It Out, Thanks to Line

In the waning moments of Super Bowl XI, Jim Marshall, the great Minnesota Viking defensive end, disgustedly began to peel off his game gloves and started to walk slowly off the field. It was a gesture later to be made famous by Roberto Duran in a fistfight when he quit the lists with a murmured “No mas!” to the referee.

Like Roberto, Marshall had had enough. He had been Shell-shocked.

Every veteran lineman in the American Football Conference could appreciate what Jim was going through. He had just undergone four quarters of shot and Shell. Light--220 pounds--but fast and tricky, he had been asked to crash through a man who looked like a Dolomite Alp with a helmet on. You didn’t know whether to rush Art Shell or ski him.

Jim Marshall got no sacks that day. In fact, he got no tackles of any kind. He spent that day in early 1977 tumbling around the Rose Bowl turf like a guy caught in an avalanche.

The Oakland Raiders beat the Vikings in that Super Bowl, 32-14. It wasn’t a contest, it was a collapse. The Raiders moved at will for 459 yards, 266 of them on the ground. They rushed 52 times and averaged 5.1 yards a carry. It was just batting practice for the Raiders.

In the first quarter, when Oakland had botched one play and had to settle for a field goal instead of a touchdown, the Raider quarterback, Ken Stabler, went to the bench, where Coach John Madden was purple with rage.

“The score should be 14-0, not 3-0!” Madden screamed.

Stabler looked at him coolly. “Don’t worry, coach,” he soothed. “There’s more where those came from.”

And there was. That’s because the Raiders ran most of their plays to their favorite route--the left side of the line. Halfback Clarence Davis rolled up 137 yards, or nearly nine yards a carry.

It wasn’t supposed to be that easy. The Vikings that season had the famous Purple People Eaters defense--Carl Eller, Alan Page, Gary Sutherland and Marshall. They had swallowed the league that season.

But this time, it was the Purple People Eaters who got et. When the game was over, it was the Raider offensive line that was burping.

When they talk of Raider tradition and Raider glory around the press boxes of the pro game, the names of Daryle Lamonica, Ken Stabler and Jim Plunkett, Cliff Branch and Fred Biletnikoff loom large, to say nothing of Ted Hendricks, Willie Brown, Jack Tatum, John Matuszak, Lyle Alzado and Howie Long. Gene Upshaw gets a call.

But it’s just possible that the hard Shell of the Raider game through the glory years was the one whose first name was Art.

When someone asked Madden before Super Bowl XI whether he planned to stick to his patented left-side attack, the coach shot back, “Why not? We still got Art Shell--and Upshaw--over there, don’t we?”

It was widely accepted that, with Shell and Upshaw anchoring the left side of the line, a limp zebra could go through a pack of hungry lions there.

In the first place, they grossed more than a quarter of a ton between them. Shell went 290 and Upshaw 270. Each was 6-foot-5. They were both quick.

“I could do a 40 in five seconds under pads; Uppie could do it in 4.7,” Shell recalls.

Most teams, like most people, are right-handed. The strong side in football--the one with the most players on one side of center--usually is the right. The Raiders, like Billy the Kid, fired left-handed. Their quarterback, Stabler, was left-handed, and when they went that way they took no prisoners.

The Raiders were also a long-striking team. This meant that pass-blocking, the most difficult form of protection, had to be of longer duration than normal. It is a rule of thumb in the pro game that you get 3.5 seconds to get rid of the ball. Raider quarterbacks expected four or five. Long passes take longer. Even Olympians need five seconds to run 50 yards.

Other teams in the league had long since made concessions to the sophisticated zone defenses and gone to short or dump-off passes.

“We never did dump off much,” recalls Shell. “You just had to hold your block till Snake (Stabler) found somebody open.”

With Stabler, the problem was intensified. Ken could move only slightly faster than holiday traffic.

Even so, Shell remembers taking it personally every time his quarterback went down.

“I felt as if someone had insulted my family,” he says. “I always went back and picked my quarterback up. I apologized to him. I felt like a pitcher giving up a home run.”

The Purple People Eaters were not the only celebrated defensive line to be tied into knots by the old Shell game. In the conference playoff game the day after Christmas in ‘76, it was the famous Pittsburgh Steel Curtain that the Raiders sent home in a barrel, 24-7.

Offensive linemen usually get about as much publicity as chimney sweeps. They work in the engine room of sports. But Art Shell is going to make it with the glamour pusses. He will be inducted in the Pro Football Hall of Fame at Canton, Ohio, next month, the sixth Raider to be so honored.

Since most of the other players in there are quarterbacks or receivers, it should be welcome news for them. Moreover, Stabler and Plunkett and Branch should feel safe in making it next, now that Shell--Upshaw is already there--will be there to protect them. If they make it, he laid the blocks to put them there.

When he was general manager of the Colts, Don Klosterman used to like to say that his idea of a lineman was a guy who was “responsible for six headaches, 17 nosebleeds, five limp-offs and three refused-to-return-to-the-games.”

It sounds like a perfect description of a Shell game.