His Bark May Be Worse Than Oilers’ Bite : Pro football: Houston’s Glanville has been accused of coaching his players to hit opponents late. The NFL hasn’t seen it that way.

As coached by Jerry Glanville, the Houston Oilers have been called the NFL’s meanest team.

Among other things, they usually lead the league in penalties for late hits and unsportsmanlike conduct.

Playing for a coach who is known as an intimidator as well as a winner and a humorist, the Oilers love a good fight above all.

But only in the stadium.

“Leave your game on the field,” Glanville told his players recently. “No fighting is allowed in restaurants or saloons--unless I’m on the floor, being pinned down by somebody.”

Wisecracks such as that leave the Oilers laughing. But their opponents are not amused, as another Astrodome crowd will rediscover Sunday.

When Glanville leads Houston into the wild-card game against the Pittsburgh Steelers, he will continue an old role as possibly the most detested coach in the NFL.

One night not long ago, for example, after a referee asked him to help the officials quiet the home crowd, Glanville said he couldn’t be of any assistance.

“They hate me worse than you,” he said.

In one respect, the league’s attitude toward the unconventional Oiler coach is understandable. Winners tend to be feared, and Glanville has shown he’s a winner. He is the only coach in the American Football Conference who has been in the playoffs the past three seasons.

Minnesota’s Jerry Burns is the only other coach with that distinction.

But the anti-Glanville sentiment runs deeper than that. Steeler Coach Chuck Noll has berated him publicly.

And when Glanville’s name came up at a news conference this month, Cincinnati Bengal Coach Sam Wyche said: “Call me if you find anyone who likes this guy.”

Why is Glanville the most hated man in the NFL?

It may be that the country’s impression of Glanville is the inevitable consequence of what he has deliberately set out to be.

He is one of the league’s most complicated individuals, a sound X’s-and-O’s coach with the instincts of a prizefighter and the urge to double as a stand-up comedian. More than any other coach, he tends to equate football and boxing, or more precisely, football and alley fighting.

He holds that the way to win is to intimidate and, if possible, dominate opponents mentally, physically and spiritually.

And as a man who proudly lives on the edge--who has said that it wouldn’t bother him to look out an airplane window and see an engine on fire--he often seems to go too far.

That’s what gets him into trouble. And that’s what gets his players in trouble when, as Glanville smiles, they grind a quarterback into the turf, or smash into ballcarriers just as, or just after, they go out of bounds.

League facts and figures suggest that Glanville’s reputation may be slightly overblown. Although the Oilers lead the NFL in penalties, they don’t lead by much.

They had 148 penalties this year. The Raiders had 132, Cleveland 128 and San Diego 122.

In penalty yardage, the Oilers won the championship with 1,138--but that was only 152 yards more than the 986 that the Pittsburgh Steelers accumulated.

And, mind you, it was Pittsburgh’s Noll who, in a memorable confrontation two years ago, publicly leveled a typically serious charge against Glanville.

As they walked off the field together after a game, Noll gestured angrily and, shocking the TV audience, shouted: “You were trying to hurt our players.”

In the week of another big game against Glanville, the Steeler coach wouldn’t talk about the incident, but an assistant, Joe Gordon, said: “We still feel the same way. We feel that (the Oilers) are coached to pile on and hit late.”

At the league office, Glanville has no defenders, but he has no accusers, either.

“(Glanville) isn’t teaching a style of play that’s outside the rules,” said Joe Browne, the NFL’s director of communications. “(He gets) no unusual communiques or warnings from the officiating department.”

The warnings come from other coaches--and the more you listen to them, the more it seems likely that what bothers people about Glanville isn’t simply the way his team plays, but the way he talks.

For example, the thing that provoked Wyche to attack Glanville verbally this month--and to run up 61 points on a team that was beaten before halftime--wasn’t a late hit. It was a Glanville comment about the Cincinnati quarterback, Boomer Esiason.

A week or so after Esiason had been forced out of a game with a bruised lung, Glanville said, “A bruised lung isn’t like a punctured lung. He’ll be all right.”

At the time, Esiason was having difficulty breathing, let alone playing football, but what Glanville meant was that with an injury of that kind, he would be all right, that he would play. Which he did.

To Wyche, however, the comment was grossly insensitive--making light of a serious injury.

“People hear that Glanville coaches dirty football, then they hear him talk and they conclude, here’s a bad one,” said Mickey Herskowitz, a Houston sportswriter. “It’s a bad rap. The things he’s done don’t justify the harshness of the reaction.

“In the days when the Oilers were dog meat, on the road to respectable, he started (popping off) for two reasons. He wanted to get some recognition--he wasn’t widely known--and he wanted to take the heat off the team.”

The payoff has been the playoffs. Among those defending Glanville as the coach of three successive playoff teams is a predecessor, Bum Phillips. “The (Oiler) talent isn’t all that great, particularly on defense,” Phillips said.

The owner of the club, Bud Adams, isn’t a wild-eyed defender, but he has been supportive.

Asked if Glanville’s style is counterproductive in terms of winning and losing, Adams said: “He’s lost some that we might have won--but he’s won some that we would have lost.

“We’re in a selling game in pro sports--and Jerry has brought some pizazz to the NFL.”

Glanville’s stock of one-liners rivals that of the stand-up comedian he’d like to be in his next life, if he couldn’t be the heavyweight champion of the world.

Thus, instead of telling interviewers that he was born poor in a tough Detroit tenement, he says: “The day I was born, my mother and I were the only two persons at the hospital who hadn’t been shot or stabbed.”

Exchanging zingers with Pittsburgh reporters in a conference call this week, Glanville was asked whether he’d stay in football if Adams fires him.

“Certainly,” he said. “I always expect to find somebody out there who doesn’t know me well enough to hire me.”

Asked if he would verify a particularly outrageous quote that had been attributed to him, Glanville said: “If you’ve already got the story written, go ahead. I don’t want to ruin your story.”

Then he added: “If you need help with the headline, let me know.”

He’s a strange one, indeed. This year, in what he thought was a secret ballot, the Oiler coach even voted for old nemesis Noll, one of his most embittered accusers, as NFL coach of the year.

Embarrassed, Glanville said: “If I’d known it would come out, I would never have done it.”