Welcome to the NFL 100, The Athletic’s endeavor to identify the 100 best players in football history. You can order the book version here. Every day until the season begins, we’ll unveil new members of the list, with the No. 1 player to be crowned on Wednesday, Sept. 8.
Imagine, for a second, that you’re a professional football player.
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One day, somebody — your agent, a coach, a reporter — calls you up and says, “Hey, there’s a new rule on the books, and it’s there because of you.”
Why is this happening? Why did the phone ring? For most men, that’s been an honor borne of bad luck. Jesse James and Calvin Johnson? Congrats. Tweaks to what constitutes a catch didn’t put their touchdowns on the board. Tom Brady? He still missed almost all of the 2008 season after a low hit begat a torn ACL.
In 1978, things were different. When the NFL changed the guidelines on what, exactly, a defensive back could do to a receiver — on how he could terrorize them and when — it wasn’t due to the misfortune of its namesake. The “Mel Blount Rule” doesn’t exist because of something that was done to the Steelers’ Hall of Fame cornerback. It exists because of what he did to others.
And the game, at least as we’ve come to know it, exists because of him, too. After eight seasons, four Super Bowls, three All-Pro nods, one Defensive Player of the Year award and 35 interceptions, the NFL decided to stop Mel Blount. They tried to stop Mel Blount. Easier said than done for a 6-foot-3, 205-pound, ball-seeking missile.
RULE 8 SECTION 4 ARTICLES 1-4: ILLEGAL CONTACT
Within the area 5 yards beyond the line of scrimmage, a defensive player may chuck an eligible receiver in front of him. The defender is allowed to maintain continuous and unbroken contact within the 5-yard zone, so long as the receiver has not moved beyond a point that is even with the defender.
“He played back in the day when they had no rules, so Mel could just knock the receivers around all over the place,” Rod Woodson — another Hall of Fame Steelers cornerback — told the NFL Network in 2019. “So the competition committee comes together and says, ‘You know what? We can’t have DBs like this knocking receivers around because they can’t get down the field.’ So they (came up with) the 5-yard chuck.
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“So thank you, Mel. Appreciate it.”
Woodson’s deadpan delivery of that line was impressive. It was also telling; the institution of the 5-yard chuck rule didn’t just revolutionize the game. It made the life of all defensive backs a little more difficult. Until 1978, they could make contact with receivers until the ball was in the air. In the post-Blount Rule world, the window got smaller. Woodson is old enough to daydream about legalized, downfield harassment. The current generation, for all intents and purposes, doesn’t know anything else.
And none of them — not Woodson, not Deion Sanders, not Darrelle Revis, not Patrick Peterson — had to change midstream, as Blount did.
He entered the league as a third-round pick in the 1970 draft, an All-American at cornerback and safety out of Southern University, one of the many future Steelers stars scouted at HBCUs by the legendary Bill Nunn. The Steelers had just finished their second season under Chuck Noll, and their first with Joe Greene and L.C. Greenwood on the roster. With half of “The Steel Curtain” in the fold, it was time to add the star quarterback (Terry Bradshaw) and secondary centerpiece (Blount) for what became the sport’s definitive dynasty.
Blount didn’t think of playing in the NFL until his junior year, when he switched sides of the ball. He also didn’t think much, as a kid who grew up in Georgia and went to college in Louisiana, of heading that far north. “I think every kid that grew up in the South wanted to stay, basically, in the South,” Blount said in 2020. “I can remember coming to Pittsburgh after the draft and thinking, ‘Oh my God, is this where I have to (live), and the weather … I didn’t really start getting used to the weather until about 10 years after.”
In other areas, he was plenty prepared.
“When I came to the (NFL), I just thought, ‘Man, what an easy life this is. Because when we played football in the SWAC, at all-Black colleges, it was physical when you got off the bus,” he said. “So the pro level, I didn’t find it to be all that challenging. I was always physical, and I tell people that I’m the youngest of 11 kids. There were seven boys and four girls, and we all grew up on a farm. It was work every day.
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“So physicality made me who I am.”
As a rookie, Blount started 10 of 14 games and picked off one pass, starting a streak that’d last until the end of his career; in 11 seasons, he never had less than one interception, and often had more. Many more. In 1971, Blount had two picks. In 1972, he had three. By 1975, he’d made his first All-Pro team and won Defensive Player of the Year. That season, he had 11 interceptions — still tied for 10th most in any single season. When he wasn’t making life impossible for wide receivers, he was doing the same for quarterbacks.
All the while, the Steelers’ success compounded. In Blount’s Defensive Player of the Year season, they won their second title, a 21-17 victory over the Cowboys in Super Bowl X.
“He kind of epitomized what Chuck used to tell us all the time: Refuse to be denied,” Greene told NFL Network. “And he was that guy. The receivers had no routes that they could run. They couldn’t get off the line of scrimmage. And when they did, he’d get hands on them and re-route them.”
Blount was an off-the-field leader, as well. When Donnie Shell was a rookie in 1974, he found himself playing mostly on special teams packages and as a nickel back, and he wasn’t happy. Blount took him to dinner and praised his contributions, regardless of whether they came on kick coverage or not.
“What he did was bring me back in the fold of the team,” Shell told former Steelers linebacker Arthur Moats recently. “I understood the team concept, that everyone has a part to play in it — whether you’re out front or not starting and coming off the bench, like I was. He made me feel special.”
Shell, a strong safety for all four Steelers Super Bowl teams, will be inducted into the Hall of Fame this summer.
By 1978, the league had seen enough. The rule outlawing bump-and-run, spearheaded by Dolphins coach Don Shula, went on the books — and Blount took it personally, not just for what it meant for him as an individual, but what he believed it said about the league’s view of the Steelers.
“When that happened, I took it as an insult,” Blount said in a March 2021 interview with Peterson and former NFL cornerback Bryant McFadden. “You’re putting this rule in because you think that’s the only way I can play, and that it’s going to slow me down. … They were trying to find ways to slow our defense down.”
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If that was the goal, the end results didn’t change much. The Steelers had two more Super Bowls in their pockets — and Blount three more Pro Bowls — by the dynasty’s end.
At its start, the average NFL team completed about 14 of 27 passes for 153 yards per game. In 1979, “the quarterback league” was born, along with another NFL epoch. If it isn’t on par with the AFL/NFL merger and the institution of the forward pass, it’s close enough. In 2020, the average team attempted about 35 passes per game. It’s basically impossible to compare today’s quarterbacks with those of the ’90s, let alone the ’60s.
This 2019 chart from Football Perspective makes the dividing line stark. Wonder what happened in the late ’70s?
Here's passing yards per game and passer rating for the entire NFL in each week since 1950 https://t.co/Njl9spdVEV pic.twitter.com/cRe8CKE3SP
— Football Perspective (@fbgchase) May 30, 2019
Blount, 32 years after his own Hall of Fame induction, is at peace with it all.
“My kids, my grandkids, they just think it’s the coolest thing,” he told Peterson and McFadden. “The older I get, the more I appreciate the fact that I had that kind of impact on the game.”
As for how Mel Blount would fare now, after more than 40 seasons of NFL life under the rule that exists because of him, and the other changes that have come in its wake?
“I’m coming out of every game, and I’m not lying, with at least two interceptions,” he said, “if not more.”
(Illustration: Wes McCabe / The Athletic; photo: Focus on Sport / Getty Images)
