It Still Pays to Be Long on Defense

If I were an NFL quarterback, the last thing in the world I would want to see as I got the ball and started to scramble back with it would be Howie Long standing behind me.

Howie Long in front of you is not too thrilling either.

First of all, there are all those muscles. Howie’s muscles have muscles, it has been pointed out. He wasn’t born, he was carved. He has this wide-eyed innocent stare as if he sees something you don’t and when he lines up, he sometimes looks as if he’s smothering a laugh. You get a picture of the quarterback calling time and saying to the officials, “I don’t snap the ball until I find out exactly what it is Long thinks is so funny.”

Looking over the line of scrimmage and seeing Howie Long already amused is like looking off the prow of a ship and seeing an iceberg, or seeing a fin circling the life raft.

John Elway is the second-best quarterback in the league. He has speed, style, elusiveness. He is as hard to bring down as a cat on a telephone pole. He has made a career out of making unpredictable exits, like a guy ducking out on a hotel bill. He has the peripheral vision of a shark and specializes in making defensive linemen think he’s in places he has just left. And making them look like Keystone Kops chasing Chaplin.

But he kept disappearing under a pile of black uniforms at the Raider-Denver game Sunday and finally disappeared altogether in the middle of the fourth quarter.

There were two theories: Either he melted down, or Howie Long ate him. I mean, when’s the last time you saw a John Elway team fail to score a touchdown? Elway’s teams usually score a touchdown before the anthem dies down.

Winning am NFL game on fumbles and an interception is like winning a fight on clinches or a World Series on bunts. The Raiders are supposed to beat you going long. Trench warfare is not their forte. They’re not a kick-and-wait-for-the-breaks-team. They’re an in-your-face, get-out-of-my-way-or-die-here-type of aggregation. They play iron-lung football.

All the stories of Raider football, though, sing of the Mad Bombers, the Snake, the dazzling dashes of Cliff Branch, Freddy Biletnikoff, tight ends and Heisman Trophy backfields. The Luftwaffe, not the infantry.

But the truth is, for all their quick-strike reputation, the Raiders, like all great teams, have always been ferocious defensive teams. Even two of their Hall of Famers--Willie Brown, Ted Hendricks--come from the other side of the ball.

The thing in shortest supply in today’s pro game is the pass rush. Hardly anybody has one anymore, not in the mold of the great units of the past--the Fearsome Foursome, the Doomsday Defense, San Francisco’s Gold Rush. The philosophy of pass defense today has changed. You don’t bomb the airfields anymore, you rely on ack-ack, interceptors.

But Howie Long (as well as Greg Townsend) is a throwback. Howie was a member of that man-eating cast of characters--Lyle Alzado and John Matuszak were the other two--who terrorized quarterbacks in the league for most of the decade. This Terrible Threesome left a trail of quarterbacks bleaching in the sun like cattle bones in Death Valley before time broke them up.

They thought Howie was as long gone as this old-fashioned pass rush, that he was history, not news. Injuries had all but immobilized his speed and explosiveness.

“I felt like a fighter who has lost his punch,” Howie was to explain. “I couldn’t punch anybody.”

No one took any liberties with him. He was still 275 pounds, a boulder with legs. But what made Howie Long Howie Long was his ability to arrive at the ball like a guy jumping through a skylight. Strength without guile, size without speed don’t cut it in the NFL.

It was not that he was old. Long is only 30. Did he give any thought to retiring?

Howie shakes his head. “I have three sons and I decided I wanted my youngest son, Howie, to know what his father could do.”

What his father could do is dominate a line of scrimmage.

It has apparently all come back to him. Elway was sacked five times Sunday, twice by Howie. Elway was wearing No. 75 much of the day, although his uniform number is 7.

In probably the key play, Elway, after three quarters of running for his life, had maneuvered his team to the Raider four-yard line, third and goal to go. Denver trailed by eight.

Elway called a pass play, probably a rollout. But Long and the ball got to Elway at the same time. For a change, Howie decided to pick up the ball instead of the ballcarrier. He slapped the ball off Elway’s cocked wrists, then pounced on it.

“I don’t normally pick balls up,” he says. “It’s not my forte. I pick people up.”

Unsure what to do with it, he instinctively set sail into a crowd. He forgot he was the pursued for a change, not the pursuer, and he went looking for people to hit. His path actually took him toward the wrong goal. Fortunately, he crashed into the Broncos’ Steve Sewell.

“When I woke up, I was on the ground,” he says. “I didn’t remember how I got there. The only time in my life I ever got knocked out before was with a baseball bat. I haven’t had much experience with unconsciousness.”

Given the character of the game, that sack and fumble undoubtedly decided the outcome. A score for Denver there would probably have made the final score 16-14. The Raider offense hasn’t scored yet this year.

The bad news for the league is, the Raiders can win a game without the ball. The worse news is that Howie Long and the football arrive at the quarterback at the same time again.

Usually, in the NFL, when the defense takes the field, the offense says, “Get us the ball back as quick as you can.” On the Raiders, the defense may tell the offense, “Give the ball back as quick as you can.” The Raiders have the highest-scoring defense in the league.

And if Long lifts any more passes off the hands of quarterbacks, when they ask him what position he played, he may answer airily, “Oh, I was just a kind of complicated wide receiver. Elway would go to me in a pinch. I was always open.”