By David Rogers. SPARTANBURG, S.C. — I first started covering the NFL as a “stringer,” contracted with a Southern California daily newspaper in the early 1980s. My beat was the San Diego Chargers. It was the heady days of “Air Coryell,” the dynamic passing offense schemed by the legendary head coach, Don Coryell.
The field general was then a future hall of fame quarterback, Dan Fouts. After Coryell was hired and installed the system, Fouts led the NFL in passing yards (4,000+ each year) for four straight years.
It is unknown to him, but Fouts is also responsible for my first lesson in football “subtleties.”
At the time, one of my friends worked as a server at a railroad car-themed restaurant in the Mission Valley area of San Diego. The grub was far from what a hobo might have eaten upon jumping a rail car for a westward migration during the Great Depression and Dust Bowl years (just five or six decades earlier). No, mouth-watering steaks of all kinds were the featured menu items: big T-bones, New York sirloins, Porterhouses and the like.
Photographic image by David Rogers
I happened to be in the restaurant one Monday night when in walked these behemoths. I could only think that Paul Bunyan, the lumberjack hero of American folklore and his brothers had arrived. The only thing missing from these lumberjacks was “Babe,” Bunyan’s fabled blue ox!
It turned out, of course, that the arriving gentle giants were the San Diego Chargers’ offensive linemen and none other than Dan Fouts was their host for the evening. My friend explained that it was a frequently observed ritual: if Fouts didn’t get sacked on Sunday, the next day he would treat all of the offensive linemen to a big steak dinner at this restaurant not far from Jack Murphy Stadium.
He may have been buying steaks, but Fouts knew which side of his bread was buttered, as the saying goes.
At the end of today’s first day of the Carolina Panthers training camp, head coach Frank Reich confirmed that top draft pick Bryce Young was indeed the Carolina Panthers’ new “QB1.” Then, watching and listening to Young himself being grilled by the media, I couldn’t help but recall those days in the early 1980s and what Dan Fouts certainly understood: much of what any quarterback — at any level — can accomplish is made possible by the offensive line in front of him. Those big guys give him time to go through his progressions, to let a play develop and to see open receivers. Even for the ball-toting running backs — or today’s running quarterbacks — it is the offensive linemen who open the gaps at the line of scrimmage.
So, during his time at the media podium today, I popped up and asked the new Panthers QB, “Have you treated your offensive linemen to a steak dinner, yet?”
Young answered appropriately, given that it was Day 1 of training camp: “We just got here!” Young, of course, had no knowledge of my Dan Fouts story and perspective, but I think he knew what I meant.
But the bigger answer was in this remarkable young man’s humble demeanor. He knows. He may have gotten tapped on the shoulder as the Panthers’ No. 1 quarterback but neither his personal success, nor the team’s ability to win games, is all about him.
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