Since the 1980s, NFL players have packed on the pounds, but is the league's emphasis on weight harmful?
By Carlos Frias, William M. Hartnett
Palm Beach Post Staff Writers
Sunday, October 29, 2006
Brad Culpepper got benched.
He was playing pretty well. He wasn't injured and he hadn't broken any of the Chicago Bears' team rules.
Except one.
He didn't weigh enough.
"The coaches would look at you and how much you weighed to see if you were going to play," said Culpepper, the former Florida Gator who played defensive line for the Bears and Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
Culpepper thrived in a Tampa Bay defense that stressed speed and strength, but then he went to Chicago, where the Bears were slaves to the scale. Like many NFL teams, Chicago had a minimum and maximum weight for each position.
One Friday morning — weigh-in day — during the 2000 season, Culpepper barely hit 265 pounds, and coaches determined he was too light to line up Sunday for a Bears team that would finish 5-11.
"Things like weighing in on a Friday were illogical to me," Culpepper said, "and it didn't make me a better football player.
"What did I do about it? I retired the next year. I'd had enough."
Culpepper was a victim of the numbers game. BIG numbers.
In the modern-day NFL, size does matter — at least if you want to keep earning a paycheck.
By compiling a database of NFL rosters dating to 1920 — nearly 40,000 players — The Post tracked the size of players decade-by-decade and team-by-team.
From 1920 to 1984, there were never more than eight players in any season who weighed 300 pounds or more. This year, there were 570 players who weighed 300 or more listed on 2006 NFL training camp rosters, nearly 20 percent of all players.
Other super-sized findings:
- Since the NFL-AFL merger in 1970, the average player is nearly 25 pounds heavier, averaging 245.
- Over the same period, the average offensive lineman is 62 pounds heavier; defensive lineman, 34 pounds.
- Running backs weigh 17 pounds more and quarterbacks are 26 pounds heavier.
Coaches, players, analysts and doctors say there are many reasons for the increases in size: the natural progression by generations; better nutrition; supplements; illegal substances, including steroids, which the league began testing for in 1987, and untested drugs like human growth hormone; workout regiments that now begin in high school.
But what has maintained the trend toward bigger and bigger players is the league's copycat tendencies — what works well for one team will soon be tried by many others.
NFL is league of copycats
Mark Schlereth experienced a range of poundage in his 12-year NFL career. He was a member of "The Hogs'' offensive line for the Washington Redskins and also played in a Denver Broncos system that demanded leaner, quicker blockers.
Schlereth, now an analyst for ESPN, gives three reasons why NFL teams started pumping and plumping their offensive linemen through the '80s and '90s.
Larry Allen. Nate Newton. Joe Jacoby.
Between them, they played in 22 Pro Bowls and packed on more than 1,000 pounds as 300-plus players.
"Whatever is in vogue, that's what the league goes for," Schlereth said. "The league saw these incredible athletes, who were huge men, and decided this is the way to go — bigger is better."
That mantra trickled down to the college and high school level, where massive linemen no longer were born but bloated up on extra cheeseburgers and shakes.
Aspiring prep tight ends, defensive ends and linebackers "ate their way to being offensive linemen,'' Schlereth said.
In 1980, offensive linemen outweighed their teammates by 45 pounds. In 2006, the difference is about the weight of one Olsen twin — 81 pounds.
Schlereth fought to keep up. In Denver, he was issued a minimum weight of 285 pounds and fined $100 for each pound short on weigh-in day.
Sometimes, just before stepping on the scale, he would guzzle a gallon of water or slip a small weight plate into his jockstrap. Players who needed to shed pounds also took extreme measures, like pulling on rubber suits to run in the heat.
"To me, it's all relatively stupid and ridiculous," said Schlereth, who now weighs 205 pounds, less than he did in high school. "On one hand, the NFL says it doesn't want things like ephedra (a banned supplement used for weight loss), but it's OK to have a guy in a rubber suit running and passing out trying to make weight."
Culpepper had to stuff himself to push 280, eating between meals and making late-night runs to McDonald's and Wendy's.
"You know how you feel after Thanksgiving dinner? I felt like that every day," said Culpepper, now a personal injury attorney in Tampa who also has slimmed down to about 205.
Eight months after retiring, Culpepper shed his football fat suit, weighing in at 195 pounds and running his first marathon in 3 hours, 50 minutes. His waist size dropped from 40 inches to 33.
More weight does not guarantee wins
NFL offensive linemen started to get bigger than their defensive counterparts in 1975, the first year the O-lines outweighed the D-lines.
This season, the average weight for an offensive lineman is 312 — 23 pounds heavier than the average defensive lineman.
The push for poundage led to earth-shaking moments for gargantuan players. In 1999, the Detroit Lions made Wisconsin offensive tackle Aaron Gibson, who at one time weighed 440 pounds, the 27th overall pick in the draft. Gibson mostly played in the upper 300s, but in 2002 he became the league's first 400-pounder at 410 with the Dallas Cowboys.
That same year, Buffalo selected 370-pound OT Mike Williams fourth overall.
Both are now out of football.
"Truth is, bigger isn't better. Better is better," Schlereth said.
Research supports Schlereth's claim.
Since 1980, the two teams with the highest winning percentages — the San Francisco 49ers and Denver — had the lightest offensive lines.
Of the five teams with the biggest offensive lines over the past 25 years, only one franchise — the Raiders — has won more games than it has lost.
When Indianapolis Colts President Bill Polian kept hearing coaches talk about the importance of size, he decided to put the theory to a test, comparing winning percentages to the average weight of players on each team over about 10 seasons.
"We found higher weight had no bearing on winning — none," said Polian, who was the general manager in Buffalo when the Bills played in four Super Bowls. "There was a lot of noise about 'Big is the answer.' We tested it. It's not valid."
The offensive linemen who played for the perfect 1972 Dolphins, including two Hall of Famers, averaged 251 pounds, 13th of 26 teams. Size apparently means little this season, too. The Dolphins average 321 on their interior line, the fourth highest in the league, but they're 1-6.
Polian now is with a team that might spur a reverse copycat trend. The Super Bowl contender Colts average 302 pounds of protection for Peyton Manning — 30th in the league.
Still, it's hard to resist the big guys.
After April's draft, Dolphins coach Nick Saban said he wished he could have worked a trade to move up and pick Haloti Ngata, a 6-4, 340-pound defensive tackle selected 12th overall by the Baltimore Ravens.
"I always say it this way: They have weight classes in boxing for a reason. The heavyweights don't fight the lightweights," Saban said. "What's the reason for that? Because if a big guy is just as good as a little guy, the little guy doesn't have much of a chance."
Dolphins linebacker Zach Thomas has done pretty well for a little guy. The six-time Pro Bowler is in his 11th season and he doesn't like it when comments about his success end with "for a guy his size."
Thomas is listed at 228, but said he plays closer to 220 and "sometimes lighter."
He remembers his second year with the Dolphins, when several trainers suggested he get bigger so his body could hold up.
"I tried to put on weight and I was sluggish," Thomas said. "Now I don't even worry about that because I know it doesn't matter."
Football becomes a 12-month job
NFL teams started encouraging players to train year-round in the 1970s.
Former Dolphins coach Don Shula, who was an NFL defensive back in the '50s, said he and his teammates did little more than play some pickup basketball and run in the off-season. Hall of Famer Art Donovan, one of Shula's teammates on the Baltimore Colts, was huge for his day at 270 but not exactly a specimen. The Colts called him "Fatso."
Shula's Dolphins and Tom Landry's Cowboys were among the first to start mandatory off-season workout sessions five days a week, three hours a day. Soon, the copycat syndrome took over in the rest of the league, especially after the Dolphins and Cowboys played in a combined seven Super Bowls.
"That's where players really started to take off as far as size goes," Shula said.
"The other teams saw the progress that you were making, then everybody started to do it so that they wouldn't be left behind."
Shula believes the push for size also led to a change in overall strategy. Bigger players on defense meant tougher yards on the ground, so more teams added advanced passing games to their offenses.
"You had to find new and better ways to do things," Shula said. "You couldn't do the old stuff that perhaps was successful for you, the ground game that didn't involve the drop-back passing."
Steroids also became a factor in the late '70s and early '80s.
Shula said steroids were "probably a part" of the boom in size, especially since testing did not begin until 1987.
"Without a doubt that happened, people looking for a magic pill to get as big and strong as they could be," Shula said.
Supplements and untested drugs like HGH are likely factors in continued growth. But ESPN's Chris Mortensen, who has been covering the NFL since the '80s, said the steroid ban has changed the frames of some of the players whose careers require packing on and maintaining the pounds.
"The bodies are different," Mortensen said. "They're not Popeye bodies. They're obese bodies."
