NOTES : Hanifan Ranks Hogs as Best Offensive Line He Has Had as Coach

After 33 years as a football coach, Jim Hanifan, the pride of the 1950 Covina High Colts, made it to the Super Bowl this year with the Washington Redskins.

And he is a principal reason they are here. His offensive line, which protected quarterback Mark Rypien devotedly through the Redskins’ 14-2 regular season, gave up only nine sacks.

The record, seven, was set by the Miami Dolphins one season when Dan Marino invariably let the ball fly at the first sign of trouble.

“With one game to go (last month), we’d given up only six sacks and were closing in on the record,” Hanifan said Friday. “But the Philadelphia Eagles got three that last day. Their defense is pretty good.”

Nonetheless, Hanifan ranks his little group, which is called the Hogs, as the best offensive line he’s had.

“They’ve achieved more,” he said of tackles Jim Lachey and Joe Jacoby, guards Raleigh McKenzie and Mark Schlereth and center Jeff Bostic. “And they’re not that old. They’ll have another two-three top years together.”

Hanifan, an All-American tight end at California in the early 1950s, coached an NFL line that gave up only eight sacks. That was in the mid-1970s at St. Louis, where he was the Cardinal line coach for six years and head coach for six.

His most famous performer was Dan Dierdorf, the ABC announcer who was nominated for the Pro Football Hall of Fame this week and will be voted on today, along with Tom Mack, Al Davis and others.

“Dierdorf is the best blocker I’ve had in the running game,” Hanifan said. “He was like a road grader.”

Hanifan, who coached at Atlanta for three seasons before coming to Washington, called Mike Kenn of the Falcons the best pass blocker he has had, but Lachey, apparently, is coming up fast.

“Lachey has a chance to become the best overall,” his coach said.

In his Southland days, Hanifan was a member of one of the most unusual high school classes in the state’s history, the Covina class of ’51.

“No bunch of people was ever closer,” he said. “We had a reunion every five years for 35 years. And we’ve had a reunion every year since then.”

Son of an Irish-born Covina rancher “who spoke eight languages,” Hanifan said he missed the Colts’ 40th reunion last summer because he was in training camp with the Redskins.

“But they sent me the video, and I couldn’t believe it,” he said. “They had 1950s film of the old campus and a couple of our football games and my old friends. And there I was, walking down the track with (football Coach) Buzz Bemoll.

“The landscape was orange groves and walnut groves and truck farms. It was a sea of green all the way to Mt. Baldy.”

If the NFL gives up on Plan B this year, the Redskins will be hardest hit.

Their coach, Joe Gibbs, strongly endorsed the controversial scheme again Friday as the most reliable way to build a pro football team.

Because each NFL franchise is allowed to protect 37 athletes before the others on the squad are designated free agents according to Plan B, “you don’t get marquee players,” Gibbs said. “But if you have specific needs, Plan B is best because you’re (evaluating) players on the pro level.

“You have a better chance to find what you want than if you look at a college player and project him as a pro.”

Gibbs’ defensive team is largely a product of Plan B recruiting. Eight of his 11 defensive starters came to Washington either as free agents or in trades after receiving high grades from the Redskins’ three Plan B scouts.

“It’s hit or miss, of course,” Gibbs said. “But so is the draft.”

Mike Hagen, a former Division II All-American wide receiver from Cal Lutheran, is a Redskin scout who, along with the club’s other scouts, has been spending his summers studying possible Plan B recruits.

“My assignment last summer was four pro clubs--Dallas, Kansas City, Denver and the Rams,” said Hagen, who began his pro football career 20 years ago as a 10-year-old water boy for the Dallas Cowboys in their Thousand Oaks days.

“I watched an (exhibition) each week and got the tapes of all four clubs for all their exhibition games,” Hagen said. “Our other (scouts) divided up the rest of the league, and we got at least one report on every player who appeared in any NFL game.”

Next, the scouting staff, working with General Manager Charley Casserly, graded the entire league by position, 1-2-3 and down.

Of the NFL’s 28 clubs, none of the others has scouted NFL clubs so thoroughly. None has been so well prepared each year for Plan B. No other defensive team has been basically built, from the ground up, with Plan B free agents.

In a talk with reporters Friday, Buffalo Coach Marv Levy, acknowledging his debt to the late George Allen--the coach who brought him into the league--said:

“George knew the game. He had a magnificent sense of priorities. He had a facility for making football fun, and he could get players to prepare.

“He also had an interesting us-against-the-world mentality. Before a Giant game, he always stressed that the New York writers were against us. For some reason, he always called them ‘those New York writers wearing glasses.’

“One day, in St. Louis, our quarterback, Sonny Jurgensen, got off the airplane, walked up to a little old guy wearing glasses and said, ‘Excuse me, sir, are you a New York writer?’ ”

At the Metrodome Sunday, the Redskins, who play on a grass field in Washington, will be making their 12th appearance on indoor artificial turf, where they are 9-2.

Their record: 3-0 at the Superdome, 2-0 at the Metrodome, 2-0 at the Kingdome, 1-0 at the Silverdome, 1-1 at the Hoosier Dome and 0-1 at the Astrodome.

Strangely, the Bills, who play on AstroTurf in Buffalo, are only 7-14 on indoor fields away from home.

The Bills’ indoor record: 1-0 at the Superdome, 1-3 at the Kingdome, 3-5 at the Hoosier Dome, 1-5 at the Astrodome and 1-1 at the Silverdome.

Bill strong safety Leonard Smith will sit out Sunday’s game because of a staph infection in his knee. The Bills are expected to place Smith on injured reserve today and replace him on the 47-man roster with cornerback Chris Hale.

Dwight Drane will replace Smith at strong safety.

Commissioner Paul Tagliabue said Thurman Thomas’ absence from a mandatory interview session Wednesday will be reviewed in February.

In a letter to the Pro Football Writers of America, Tagliabue wrote that he contacted Buffalo General Manager Bill Polian about the incident.

Thomas, angered that he was not receiving enough publicity, skipped the interview session in protest. Levy skipped a mandatory media session last season before Super Bowl XXV and was later fined $5,000.

Times staff writer Chris Dufresne contributed to this story.