Tag: Bob Lilly

The best pro football player to wear every jersey number

Touchdown Wire’s Doug Farrar picks the best pro football player to wear every jersey number — from Jim Otto (00) to Aaron Donald (99).

Football is a game of numbers, and that includes jersey numbers — which define players in our minds to a certain degree. Who can think of Hall of Fame center Jim Otto without thinking of his 00 jersey, or Warren Moon’s No. 1, or a host of legendary quarterbacks rocking the No. 12, and on and on.

In this specific exercise, we are determining the greatest player in pro football history to wear each jersey number from 00 to 99. Sometimes, the choices are eminently obvious, and other times… not so much. No. 8 had the duel between Steve Young and Troy Aikman, just as we saw in multiple NFC Championship games in the early 1990s. No. 21 had us deciding between LaDainian Tomlinson, Deion Sanders, Frank Gore, Charles Woodson, and Patrick Peterson. Yikes!

On and on it went, but we finally worked through each jersey number and each correspondingly greatest player, and here is that list for your perusal — with the honorable mentions that made this process quite tricky at times.

‘We’re going to the Super Bowl, rookie:’ Cliff Harris shares Bob Lilly story during Hall of Fame speech

In 1970, the rookie safety got off-color words of encouragement from Mr. Cowboy, who was there Saturday for Harris’ Hall of Fame speech.

Every NFL player has an archive of personal stories about their time in the league, no matter how long or short their career is. If that player is fortunate enough to enjoy a long tenure and see some measure of success, the remembrances only become richer and more plentiful. And if that player beats the long odds to one day be enshrined in Canton, every moment from their playing days becomes indelibly stamped with a new sense of historical importance.

Cliff Harris was welcomed into the Pro Football Hall of Fame on Saturday night. And to mark the occasion of the ultimate ending to a football life, the 71-year-old thought back to one of his very first moments as a Dallas Cowboy.

Imagine standing in an NFL huddle during your first home game. Your stomach is doing somersaults, your mind reeling. You search desperately for any reassuring influence, some small thing to cling to as your senses go into overdrive and your grasp on reality starts to slip. Now imagine the actual face of your franchise staring at you and informing you- in off-color language and no uncertain terms- that his success and that of the rest of the team rides, in part, on every move you’re about to make.

Welcome to the NFL, rookie.

Harris, like seemingly so many Hall of Famers, took an almost unbelievable path to the league. A second-string junior varsity quarterback in his Arkansas hometown, Harris wasn’t expected to play past 9th grade. Then he didn’t even start until moving to a new high school for his senior year. Then he received just one scholarship offer, from the practically unknown Ouachita Baptist University, where his father had played.

Undrafted out of college, he was one was of 120 free agents invited to work out for the Cowboys in Thousand Oaks, California in 1970. He was one of very few who was still around for the return trip to Dallas. After the preseason, Coach Tom Landry announced that Harris would start Week 1 at free safety, the only first-year starter on the roster.

In the old Cotton Bowl Stadium, Harris joined the huddle with the rest of the already fabled “Doomsday Defense” in a game versus the Giants. Across from the 21-year-old rookie was Bob Lilly, the very first draft choice in franchise history. Lilly was at that point a seven-time Pro Bowler who was such a foundational piece of the organization that his nickname was “Mr. Cowboy.” And he was staring right at Harris.

“Before Lee Roy Jordan called the defensive play,” Harris recalled Saturday, “Bob looked over at me and said, ‘We’re going to the Super Bowl, rookie. And I don’t want you to do anything to… mess it up.'”

The pause implied pretty clearly that Lilly had not used the word “mess” that late September day.

“I just nodded and said, ‘Yes, sir, Mr. Lilly.’

“And sure enough, we did go to the Super Bowl. But we didn’t win. Bob never made that part of the deal.”

The Cowboys finished Harris’s rookie season with a 10-4 mark and the NFC East crown. They beat the Lions and the 49ers in the playoffs, allowing just 10 points total in those two postseason games. They went on to lose Super Bowl V to the Baltimore Colts by a 16-13 score in an mishap-filled contest that went on to be remembered informally as “The Blunder Bowl.”

The Cowboys rebounded, of course, as did Harris. “Captain Crash” went to a total of five Super Bowls and won rings in two of them. He was chosen for six straight Pro Bowls and was an All-Pro four times. He was named to the NFL’s All-Decade Team for the 1970s and is a member of the Cowboys’ Ring of Honor.

Now he’s enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. And who was staring across the stage at Harris while he made his speech to mark the occasion?

Mr. Cowboy himself.

This time, though, Bob Lilly just smiled, knowing Cliff Harris hadn’t… messed it up.

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Watch: Joe Flacco perfectly replicates the longest negative play in Super Bowl history

How had are the Jets? They’re now copying Super Bowl history — in all the worst ways.

It’s getting difficult to keep track of all the ways in which the Jets are setting all-time marks for offensive incompetence, but here’s one historical note from Miami’s 24-0 Sunday blowout of Adam Gase’s Symphony of Destruction. With 9:28 left in the game, and the Jets with the ball at the Miami 29-yard line on third-and-4, quarterback Joe Flacco took the ball from center and dropped back… and back… and back… until he was sacked for a 28-yard loss by Dolphins lineman Emmanuel Ogbah.

“I think there’s a lot of … These guys like playing together, so when other guys make plays, whether it’s offense, defense, special teams, you see a lot of excitement, a lot of energy,” Dolphins head coach Brian Flores said after the game, about Ogbah’s teammates being happy that this play took the Jets out of field goal range and preserved the shutout. “Guys were excited for Ogbah to make a play. Guys were excited about the situation, of getting a stop and getting them out of field goal range, and they were excited about the potential to get a shutout. That’s what I like to see, guys enjoying kind of the process of working through the week, prep and preparing, walk throughs, meeting, practice, and then going out and executing on a Sunday afternoon. I think they’re just happy for each other and kind of reaping some of the fruits of their labor.”

This maladjusted piece of offense immediately brought another play to mind involving the Dolphins. In Super Bowl VI on January 16, 1972, the Cowboys brought their long championship drought to an end with a commanding 24-3 win over Miami. Perhaps the spotlight play of that game was a 29-yard sack of Dolphins Hall of Fame quarterback Bob Griese by Cowboys Hall of Fame defensive lineman Bob Lilly. It is still the longest negative play in Super Bowl history, and the similarities are striking.

It was a long way for the then 11-year veteran to run, as he said after the game.

“I never thought I would ever catch him. I must have scrambled 100 yards, and defensive tackles aren’t supposed to do that.”

The 1972 Dolphins recovered from that loss to become the only perfect team in NFL history, and they won the next two Super Bowls. We do not expect the Jets to present a similar transformative result.