Some players are known for playing a position. Others define it.
Jack Youngblood, Reggie White, and Michael Strahan all played defensive end, but they didn’t define it quite like “The Secretary of Defense.”
NFL Hall-of-Fame defensive end David “Deacon” Jones, who passed away of natural causes Monday, did just that.
Deacon was a freak, blessed with a combination of size and speed the NFL had never seen before.
He had the frame at 6 feet, 5 inches and 272 pounds, which would make current defensive coordinators drool. In 1961, when Jones started his career in the NFL, that combination made him unstoppable.
This would normally be where I would go on to point out some eye-popping statistic to illustrate just how good Deacon Jones really was but there’s a problem with that; he doesn’t have them.
Wait what?
Deacon Jones was the best to ever step on a football field, but no one knows how many sacks he had?
That’s because the sack, which wasn’t an official NFL stat until 1982, was a term that Jones coined.
“Sacking the quarterback is just like you devastate a city,” Jones said in a 1984 interview. “It’s like you put all of the offensive players in one bag, and I just take a baseball bat and beat on the bag.”
It’s estimated that Jones had somewhere in the ballpark of 175 sacks, though Jones claimed that his total was 180.5.
He also claimed to have 26 sacks in 1967 and another 24 in 1968. Both of which would eclipse Michael Strahan’s current single-season sack record of 22.5.
But he didn’t just invent the sack; he pioneered a way of getting past offensive linemen and getting to the quarterback.
Swinging his outside arm like the aforementioned baseball bat, Jones would slam his hand into the offensive lineman’s head, knocking him to the side and giving Jones a wide-open lane to the quarterback.
Jones’ “head slap” move was so devastating, it led the league to ban the maneuver in 1977. It still laid the groundwork for the techniques that defensive linemen use today.
Watch a defensive end use a club-and-rip move.
As he clubs the offensive lineman’s hands to the side with his outside arm and rips underneath with his inside arm, that’s Jones’s move, but modified.
It’s funny because Jones didn’t even invent the head slap for which he became so famous. His teammate Rosey Grier taught him the move. Jones simply perfected it.
Kind of like how “Rembrandt of course did not invent painting,” Jones once said.
Jones alongside Grier combined with Lamar Lundy and fellow Hall-of-Famer Merlin Olsen to form the greatest defensive line in NFL history: the "Fearsome Foursome."
Together, the Fearsome Foursome struck fear into the hearts of quarterbacks that had to take the field against them.
George Allen, who coached the Los Angeles Rams in Jones’s time, said Deacon was “the greatest defensive end of modern football.”
Not bad for a 14th-round draft pick out of Mississippi Valley State.
Jones was the longest of long shots and went on to become among the best defensive players in the history of the game.
No one can put a number on the striking nature of his deep, raspy voice that, even into his seventies, still had an unmistakably intimidating tone.
No one can look on a stat sheet and put a number on his piercing stare.
He played the game with a chip on his shoulder. He came after opponents like they beat his family and stole his television.
Jones was more than just a defensive end; he revolutionized the position.
He revolutionized the game
As the NFL has become a pass-first league, pass rushers are some of the most sough-after players.
Every pass rusher who has ever recorded a sack owes a debt to Deacon Jones.
Because Deacon Jones was the original.
