Jack What would you say to the critics that say you played in the weakest division in football for years and played against right tackles for most of your career?On the Jack Youngblood chat you asked this question, I don't know what his answer will be, but it is a chance to talk about the differences in the game from the 1960-70s and the 1980s till present
I will leave the weak division aside, since I don't know what you meant by by it, but the second part of the question insinuates that Youngblood (and all left defensive ends in that era) played against weaker tackles since they were right tackles.
That assumption is totally wrong. In that era the best tackles in football were right tackles, not left tackles,
The tackles in the Hall of Fame from that era are mostly right tackles. Bob Brown, Dan Dierdorf, Ron Yary, Rayfield Wright were all strong side tackles. Only Ar Shell was a left tackle and he was a strong side tackle since they were the only team that had a left handed QB and played their TE to the left more than the right. So Shell was not protecting Stabler's blind side, he was protecting the front side.
In the 1980s, things changed with more teams on defense playing 3-4 defenses and blitzing their right linebackers. At first, teams would combat that by usuing a TE or back to pick up the blitzing LBer but when LT came along, he was too good for a TE or back to handle so they change the protections so the tackle would pickup LT and teams needed more quality Left tackles to do that, so things changed.
In the 1960s and 1970s most of the great DEs were left DEs. Deacon Jones,Carl Eller, Rich Jackson, Bubba Smith, Claude Humphrey, Jack Youngblood, LC Greenwood, etc.
The right DEs were rarely All-Pro, compared to LDEs. Harvey martin was 1st team once,s Bubba Baker once, Bill Stanfill twice...but the players I named were All-pro a lot more often.
So, from the 1960s to early 1980s, the toughest competition was for a left defensive end. It's just that less knowlegeable fans know that. They are victims of recentism. They think because the term "blind side" or left tackle is common now that it applied in the 1970s. It didn't.
