In the midst of this upheaval, the only free agent A-list left tackle, Will Wolford of the Buffalo Bills, announced his new deal: he’d be leaving the Bills for the Indianapolis Colts, who had agreed to pay him $7.65 million over three years. That was more than any lineman had ever been paid, of course, but the money wasn’t what was most astonishing. Wolford’s agent, Ralph Cindrich, later said that at least four other teams had been willing to match the Colts’ offer. What had set the Colts apart from the other bidders was a clause they agreed to insert into Wolford’s new contract. It guaranteed that Will Wolford, left tackle, would remain the highest paid player on the Colts’ offense for as long as he played on it. Better paid than the Colts’ running backs, the Colts’ wide receivers, or any of the other acknowledged stars. Even if the Colts went out and got themselves the NFL’s most expensive quarterback, Wolford’s salary would rise to eclipse his, too. “I thought linemen would get a little more money from free agency,” said Wolford later. “But I didn’t think that would happen. I was numb.”
He wasn’t the only one. The Bills were furious: how could any lineman demand a clause that guaranteed him he would be paid more than star quarterback Jim Kelly, or star running back Thurman Thomas? The NFL didn’t like the idea of any player having a clause in his contract guaranteeing him more money than his teammates, and it made noises about voiding the deal. That’s when Ralph Cindrich went on the warpath. He asked, pointedly, if the league would have the same reservations if the clause had been in some quarterback’s contract. He accused the league, in the pages of the New York Times, of “discrimination against offensive linemen.” And the NFL let the deal slide, but only after saying no such deal would be permitted in the future. “There’s a mentality about linemen that goes back to high school,” said Cindrich. “When you picked your football team, these were the last guys picked.”
There wasn’t a left tackle in the game who imagined himself to be as valuable as the star running back, much less the quarterback. How could this happen? How could the people paying these vast sums assign a value to a player that he wouldn’t dare assign to himself? How could they justify it, when the left tackle had no statistics to measure his value—no “production”? Bill Polian was the general manager of the Bills in 1986, when the team used its first-round pick to take Will Wolford of Vanderbilt University. When Wolford jumped to the Colts, Polian was working in the league office and found himself embroiled in the discussions over the disturbing new contract. Then in 1997 he left—to become the GM of the Colts. “You want to know why this organization gave Will that contract?” he asked. “He got it for the simple reason that he shut down Lawrence Taylor in the Super Bowl.”
Left tackles everywhere failed to sleep the night before they faced Lawrence Taylor. What they didn’t appreciate was that there was gold in their anxiety. Their fear was a measure of their value. A year earlier, the Bills had lost to the New York Giants in Super Bowl XXV, 20–19. Yet Lawrence Taylor hadn’t been a factor—and a lot of front office executives apparently noticed the relative tranquillity on the blind side of Bills quarterback Jim Kelly. In effect, they had asked themselves a question: if we were to play the Giants, how much would I pay to have Lawrence Taylor erased from the field of play? The number was higher than they ever imagined. Until the next year—because the number kept rising. And in 1995, Steve Wallace of the San Francisco 49ers became the first offensive lineman to sign a contract worth $10 million. The quarterback might still get all the glory. But the guy who watched his back would be moving into a bigger house.
That was the beginning of what became a massive revaluation of the left tackle position. The NFL had a new designation: the “franchise player.” A team could claim one player as its franchise player, and thus prevent him from becoming a free agent. In exchange, the team had to pay him the greater of 120 percent of his old salary or the average of the league’s top five salaries at his position. Of the twenty-eight franchise players named in 1993, nine were left tackles, the most at any one position. (Steve Wallace was one of them.) These moves simply reflected the left tackle’s rapidly rising cost. NFL teams saw, instantly, that a left tackle even after he’d been designated a franchise player was cheaper than a left tackle purchased on the open market.
All through the 1980s and into the 1990s, offensive linemen had competed with tight ends and kickers for the title of lowest paid players on the football field. In 1990, for instance, the average starting offensive lineman was paid $398,000 a year, while the average wide receiver made $504,000 a year, the average defensive end made $551,000 a year, the average running back made $620,000 a year, and the average quarterback made $1.25 million a year. The left tackle, Anthony Muñoz pointed out, made his living trying to prevent a guy making twice as much as he did from killing a guy who made three times more.* By the 2005 season, the left tackle would be paid more than anyone on the field except the quarterback, and the percentage difference between the two of them had shrunk dramatically. The average pay of the top five starting left tackles was $7.25 million a year, compared to $11.9 million for the quarterbacks.
The curious thing about this market revaluation is that nothing had changed in the game to make the left tackle position more valuable. Lawrence Taylor had been around since 1981. Bill Walsh’s passing game had long since swept across the league. Passing attempts per game reached a new peak and remained there. There had been no meaningful change in strategy, or rules, or the threat posed by the defense to quarterbacks’ health in ten years. There was no new data to enable NFL front offices to value left tackles—or any offensive linemen—more precisely. The only thing that happened is that the market was allowed to function. And the market assigned a radically higher value to the left tackle than had the old pre-market football culture.
And still no one really knew who he was. If he was never distinguished from his fellow linemen, it was because his contribution had always been indistinguishable from theirs. His exact value had always been a mystery, in part, because he never did anything by himself. To say that one lineman was more important than the others was as preposterous as arguing for the special value of a single synchronized swimmer. That was about to change: football strategy had broken up the collective. Or, rather, it had yanked this one member of the collective out into his own private business. Hardly anyone knew who he was—yet. But they knew the guy he was paid to stop! And two days after the game it would occur to them that Chris Doleman or Lawrence Taylor or Bruce Smith hadn’t factored into the game. It was as if the star hadn’t played.
That was the great left tackle’s shot at recognition. He wasn’t himself in the spotlight. No one was taking his picture. But he reflected the light of the star across from him. He was a kind of photographic negative.
UNTIL THEY STARTED paying left tackles huge sums of money, the NFL talent evaluators didn’t really have a rigorous idea of what one looked like. There was no prototype. And for a brief period, right after the birth of free agency, all sorts of unlikely characters who would soon be dismissed as physically ill-equipped for the position made a fortune playing left tackle. Steve Wallace knew he could have used another 50 pounds. “I’d have given myself a big wide ass,” he said. “I didn’t have that girth in the butt.” Will Wolford wasn’t the prototype, either. In college he’d played right tackle; his first year with the Bills he’d played right guard. Like Wallace, he had been thrust into this strange new role on the offensive line—head to head with this wildly dangerous beast bent on killing the quarterback—and figured it out. He got by on guile rather than sheer physical ability. Like Wallace, he could have used a few more pounds. Plus his arms were too short. Judged physically not up to the task, he was moved back to guard in 1996 and retired after the 1998 season. As late as 2006 he said, “If I had long arms I’d still be playing.”
Once the money started to fly, the talent evaluators became connoisseurs of left tackle flesh. The Wallaces and Wolfords were exposed as physically inadequate; the left tackle now had to meet a list of physical specifications rarely found in a human being. “I can sit in the draft room today and tell you the most likely things the scouts will say, when they talk about a college lineman,” said Ernie Accorsi, the general manager of the New York Giants. “The first is, ‘He’s a tackle, but he’ll have to be a guard in the pros.’ The second is, ‘He played left tackle in college, but he’ll have to play right tackle in the pros.’” The left tackle was now meant to be the 300-plus-pound guy who was also among the best athletes on the field. Now that he was making rarefied sums of money, he was expected to be, by definition, rare. “It’s tough to find three-hundred-fifty-pound guys who can move their feet,” said Accorsi. “They are either six two, or their arms are too short or their hands are too small or their feet are too slow or they simply aren’t athletic enough. You can coach a lot of things but you can’t coach quick feet. You can’t make a guy’s arms longer, or his hands bigger. And you can’t make them taller.”
Accorsi inadvertently made an interesting point. It was probably true that the NFL couldn’t lengthen the arms or stretch the torsos of fully grown men. On the other hand, they could wave millions of dollars in the air and let the American population know that the incentives had changed. Boys who thought they might make careers as power forwards, or shot putters, might now think twice before quitting the high school football team. Huge sums of money were there for the taking, so long as you met certain physical specifications.
Case in point: Jonathan Ogden. At the dawn of free agency, Ogden, the son of a Washington, DC, investment banker, had just graduated from the St. Albans School. He was six nine and weighed nearly 350 pounds, but his weren’t the right sort of pounds, at least to begin with. When he arrived at UCLA, to play football and put the shot, Ogden’s nickname was “Fat Albert.” He liked football but he loved the shot put—and had a legitimate chance to make the U.S. Olympic team. At St. Albans he had played right tackle and enjoyed it, because teams typically ran the football behind the right tackle and run blocking was fun. At UCLA, his new coach told him he was moving to left tackle and becoming, chiefly, a pass blocker. Ogden bridled. “I called my father,” he said, “and I told him, ‘They’re trying to make me play left tackle!’ My dad told me just to do it—because if I was going to play football, left tackle was the position to play.” For a few years after the birth of free agency it helped a young man suited to play left tackle to have an investment banker for a father. After that the finances became so obvious that no one needed an investment banker to interpret them.
Jonathan Ogden remained unsure of his future in football. His freshman year at UCLA wasn’t especially encouraging. The leap from high school to college was giant, much bigger, in his view, than the leap from college to the pros. “My entire freshman year,” he said, “was a blur.” His high school team had about ten plays; his college team ran, more or less, a pro offense. Pass blocking—which struck him as an almost passive activity—was a lot less interesting to him than run blocking. But by his sophomore year he had figured out where he was meant to go, and what he was meant to do, and it came naturally to him. After that season—the 1994 season—four of the defensive ends he’d faced were taken in the first round of the NFL draft. He’d gone head to head with four extremely good blind side pass rushers—Willie McGinest, Shante Carver, Trev Alberts, Jamir Miller—and hadn’t allowed a single sack. “It was then I thought, ‘If they can be first-round picks, why can’t I be a first-round pick?’”
Good question! Nobody called him Fat Albert anymore. Ogden had slimmed from 350 to 310 pounds and then built himself back up in the UCLA weight room to 345 pounds. Muscle had replaced fat. He was faster and quicker and stronger and altogether terrifying. Six foot nine inches and 345 very mobile pounds. “I had some weeks in college where I could have had a cup of coffee in one hand and blocked the guy with the other,” said Ogden—and when this elicits a laugh, he raises his hand and says, “No. Seriously.” There were games when they’d just give up, and he’d look around and say, “They’re not rushing!” His junior year was when he first heard himself described with a term he’d hear ad nauseam for the rest of his football career: freak of nature. He heard scouts say, also, that he was a “finesse” player. He reckoned that scouts always had to have one critical reservation, and so they’d dreamed that one up for him, as he had no flaw. “Coming out of college I was the best pass blocker in the country,” he said. “It wasn’t even close. They had to have one ‘but.’”
But…to accuse him of being a “finesse” player? “Who the hell were they looking at?” he asked. The job might not call for aggression. But the player was ferocious. At the end of Ogden’s junior season, UCLA was getting creamed by Kansas in the Aloha Bowl. They were down by 31 points going into the fourth quarter, the game was clearly over, and yet the defensive end he’d been manhandling all day just kept coming hard. Ogden thought he could see what he was up to: he thought he might beat Jonathan Ogden and make a name for himself. Maybe the guy had been reading the stuff the NFL scouts were saying about him in the newspapers—that deep down Jonathan Ogden was soft. “He kept coming,” said Ogden. “So I picked him up, slammed him to the ground, and drove him into the dirt. When I was on top of him, I said, ‘Look, man, it can either be like this for the rest of the quarter or we can relax and finish the game.’ And he actually slowed down!”
The Baltimore Ravens selected him with the fourth pick in the 1996 draft—and handed him the largest signing bonus of his year: $6.8 million. He celebrated with a trip to Las Vegas. He was sitting at the blackjack table when someone tapped him on the shoulder and said, “Hey, aren’t you Jonathan Ogden?” He turned around: it was Charles Barkley, the basketball legend. Here he was, a supposedly obscure offensive lineman, and Charles Barkley knew who he was. And he hadn’t played a down in the NFL. After that, Ogden put aside his ambition to put the shot for the U.S. Olympic team.