NFL 100: At No. 5, Reggie White, the Minister of Defense, ruled through utter physical domination

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.

Typically, Phil Simms spent his final moments in the locker room before a game making sure his knowledge of the week’s playbook was buttoned up. The former New York Giants quarterback made sure he knew all the checks he’d have to make at the line of scrimmage. But sometime in the mid-1980s, in the underbelly of Veterans Stadium before a game against the Philadelphia Eagles, Simms did something different. He gave himself a pep talk. 

“I didn’t even look at my playbook,” Simms remembers. “I just sat there and I’d go, ‘OK, now. Hang in there.’ I’m talking to myself: ‘Just gotta hang in there. You’re gonna get hit, don’t worry about it. Just make your reads, throw the ball.’ All this stuff. And that was truly my thought process. I never did that against anybody else.”

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That’s because nobody else had Reggie White. 

“I never saw the kind of fear in the eyes of a lineman the way they used to be afraid of blocking Reggie,” says former Eagles linebacker Garry Cobb, “because they knew this guy is just tossing people.”

For most of those unfortunate enough to line up across from White, there were two ways of handling that fear. One way was to follow Simms’ lead. Accept the dread and find a way forward. Or you could go the opposite direction and confront the beast head-on, as one poor Detroit Lions offensive lineman did during a preseason practice against the Eagles in 1986. 

“The O-line and the D-line were doing one-on-one pass rush,” remembers Jeff Fisher, who was the Eagles defensive backs coach at the time. “And Reggie literally just shook and hip-tossed and blew by him. And the player came back and he just was MF’ing Reggie. … After the tirade was done, I’m told Reggie just looked around and said, ‘Jesus is coming.’ And so Reggie patiently waited in line for his turn and then stepped out of turn and lined back up on this same player. And literally destroyed him. I mean, just shook and tossed him. Then he bent over and reached down to help him and said, ‘Jesus is here.’”

Over the course of his 15 NFL seasons, White made lasting impressions on everyone he played with, against and for. To his opponents, he was the bare-armed, bare-handed best defensive lineman in the game. To his coaches, he was the skeleton key to great defense. To his teammates, he was a leader, a spiritual advisor and a class clown. 

After two years with the Memphis Showboats of the USFL, White arrived in Philadelphia in 1985 and quickly proved himself worthy of the hype with 13 sacks. A year later, Buddy Ryan took over as head coach and brought along his vaunted 46 defense. Depending on which side of the ball you were on, it was a match made in heaven or hell. 

“The 46 defense basically covers the center and both guards,” says Fisher. “At that time protection-wise, the league hadn’t caught up. What happens is you can create one-on-one matchups.”

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Lined up either at left defensive end or directly over the center, White was unblockable by one player alone. His sack total rose to 18 in 1986 and then to 21 in the strike-shortened 1987 season. 

“People always ask me, because I’ve coached so many great players, who was the best?” says Wade Phillips, who was the Eagles’ defensive coordinator from 1986 to ’88 before he went on to coach the likes of Bruce Smith, J.J. Watt and Aaron Donald. “I always say Reggie had the best year that anybody’s ever had. … We only had 12 games, he had 21 sacks. I don’t think anybody will ever come close to that.”

Off the field, White was both a philosopher and a comedian. He would stage full-length wrestling matches in the locker room, dump water jugs onto a coach’s head in the middle of practice and playfully tease everyone in his orbit with his unmistakable raspy voice. His secret weapon was impressions. 

“He was the best,” says former Eagles wide receiver Mike Quick. “He was as good as anybody I’ve ever seen who’s not on stage making money doing impressions.”

“Macho Man” Randy Savage, Elvis, Muhammad Ali, Buddy Ryan, every other coach in the building, and on and on the list went, including his piece de resistance Rodney Dangerfield. 

“That dude, Reggie had him down to a T,” says Quick, laughing at the memory. 

While White acted like a “big kid” at times, being the locker room cut-up also helped him become a leader. It made the best player on the team seem approachable, not above everyone else. 

“The guys would listen to him,” says Cobb. “And that was a tough group to lead. There were a lot of strong personalities with people like Seth (Joyner) and Andre (Waters). Jerome (Brown), of course. … People have no idea what goes on in the huddle during the game because everybody’s emotions are out. The closest of teams get into it during the game. (White) was a guy that could deal with all that. He wasn’t really a hothead. Seth’s turned all the way up. Jerome’s turned all the way up. So they could get into it and (White) would be the guy who could handle that. He was always even-keeled and he was always a leader.”

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Those late-’80s, early-’90s Eagles defenses are among the greatest ever. There were Pro Bowlers at each level, with Eric Allen and Wes Hopkins in the secondary and Joyner and William Thomas at linebacker. Up front were Brown in the middle and Clyde Simmons on the right side. 

“You’ll never assemble a defensive line like that ever again,” says Fisher. 

For the opposition, though, everything was still about White. 

“I remember (our offensive coordinator) Ron Erhardt, who designed blocking schemes, blitz protections and everything that still holds up in the modern world and people still use,” says Simms. “He was great at it. But the front (the Eagles) would play would make them get one-on-ones. And Ron would go, ‘OK, this is a new protection we’ll do just for Philadelphia. Whoever does not have the guy over him, find out where Reggie White is and go help.’ That was truly what was said in the meetings. We were so buttoned up and professional, (then) all of a sudden we got this, ‘Whatever you’re doing, if you can, run over and help the team stop Reggie.’”

“He was unselfish in the sense that he knew that people were gonna double-team him, and Clyde and those guys would have one-on-one opportunities,” says Quick. “But that never fazed him. And when Reggie decided that he wanted to make a play, you could put two people on him if you wanted to, but you’re just wasting them because he’s gonna make a play. That’s how good Reggie was.”

Often, that play was made on account of his patented hump move. Listed as 6-5, 291, though he topped 300 pounds for most of his career, White “moved like a linebacker” as Phillips describes it. The speed and power he generated coming off the line of scrimmage meant offensive linemen had to account for him bursting off the edge. But if they leaned too far in that direction, White’s thunderbolt of a right arm came across to knock them out of the way.

“To be able to stop him, you had to try to get in front of him,” says Phillips. “And then when you start moving that way, he would come with that hump move and throw you out of the way.”

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“Domination,” says Fisher. “There’s no better way to describe it, utter physical domination.”

“He could take a 320-pound man and just toss him like it was nothing,” says Quick, laughing again. “The funniest thing is to see a 320-pound man just being tossed, and I’ve never seen anything like that.”

Adding to the presentation of his dominance was the stylistically naked way he went about it. Most of the time, White wore nothing on his arms or hands. No extra pads, no tape on his fingers. Just a country-strong man who looked like he rolled out of bed ready to go to work on the assembly line discarding misfit linemen.

In eight years with the Eagles, White finished with 124 sacks in 121 games. As dominant as he and those teams were, there’s still a tinge of disappointment for Eagles fans looking back. For one, there is the bitterness of being regarded as among the best teams never to have won a Super Bowl. For two, there was the heartbreak of his departure.

When White signed with Green Bay in 1993, it was a seminal moment for the league. He charted the course for free agency in the generation that followed and may have saved a Packers franchise that was viewed as borderline unworthy in the decades since their Vince Lombardi-led glory years. During his six seasons in Green Bay, White found the football salvation he’d been searching for.

In his 15 seasons, White finished with fewer than 10 sacks only three times, including his 8.5 for the No. 1 Packers defense in 1996. That year, he saved his best.

In Super Bowl XXXI, White had been largely held in check during the first half, but the Packers carried a 27-14 lead over the Patriots into halftime. In the second half, New England decided it was time to play catch-up on offense. They began passing on nearly every down and removed tight end Ben Coates’ secondary responsibility of chipping White on every pass play in an effort to get him out on routes quicker. The result was a one-on-one matchup for White against right tackle Max Lane and a green light to pin his ears back.

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“One time I set on Reggie, he decided to bull-rush me and literally my feet came off the ground because he came in low and … picked me up into (quarterback Drew) Bledsoe’s lap,” Lane remembers. “I’d never felt that before. And I never felt it afterward. There’s a lot of things that get blurry over the years, but that feeling did not. It was that naturally freaky strength.”

In terms of trying to quantify how often a defensive player wrecked a game, you can do worse than counting three-sack games. White and Lawrence Taylor are tied for the all-time lead with 12 three-sack games apiece in the regular season. But in the second half of Super Bowl XXXI, White made it 13 as he helped deliver the Packers their first Super Bowl trophy in over 30 years. When the game was over, White was the one who paraded around the field with the aptly named Lombardi Trophy as if it had always belonged to him.

Looking back, Lane figures he’s in good company at least.

“He even tea-kettled Larry Allen, so I didn’t feel so bad,” he says.

There are so many ways to slice White’s dominance as the greatest sack artist of all time. Here’s one. His 13 sacks as a rookie are tied for the third-most ever. His 31 sacks through two seasons are the second-most. After that, he’s atop the leaderboard for most sacks through three years all the way up to 19, when Bruce Smith finally surpassed the total White finished with in 15. (Of course, sacks only became an official stat in 1980. Pro Football Reference has done the work to account for unofficial sacks before 1980, in which case Deacon Jones would overtake White for a few of those seasons. Then again, if White hadn’t spent the first two years of his career in the USFL, who knows how many more he’d have.)

Most sacks to start a career

White’s death in 2004 at the age of 43 still registers as a shock nearly 20 years later. His life was about so much more than football and he had so much more to do.

“Reggie was a spiritual leader for a lot of people,” Quick says. “I think that he was wise beyond his years. A lot of the things he told us that we should be doing were a lot of the things I learned later in life. To me, it’s hard to find a better man.”

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“I think he was so important that God just wanted to bring him home early because he needed him.”

If there is solace in White’s absence, it’s that his legacy is very much alive. When J.J. Watt was drafted by the Houston Texans in 2011, Phillips was the head coach. He decided to play Watt on the edge because he remembered how well it worked for White to have one-on-one matchups with the offensive tackle.

Any time an offense uses a slide protection, that’s a vestige of the invention bred by the necessity of trying to stop White. When a defensive player is penalized for landing on the quarterback with the full weight of his body, blame White. Whenever a player signs a big-ticket deal in free agency, they have White to thank. And then there’s the trickle-down effect of the lessons White imparted directly.

In 2000, after one year of retirement, White came back for one last season with the Carolina Panthers. Mike Rucker was a second-year defensive end trying to learn how to be a pro. His locker was next to White’s.

“When you’re able to locker next to Reg, you’ve got history on your side,” he says. “For me to be able to sit there and allow him to pour into me spiritually, from a football perspective and just how to carry yourself off the field, that’s invaluable. … How do you carry being successful? How do you carry yourself when someone asks you for an autograph and you’re sore and you’re icing your knees and maybe the season’s not going the way we want it? How do you react? I got to see that first-hand.”

From Rucker’s perspective, he passed on the lessons he learned from White to Julius Peppers, who passed it on to Charles Johnson, who passed it on to Mario Addison, who passed it on to Brian Burns. It’s easy to draw the same line in Philadelphia all the way to Brandon Graham, or to someone like Rashan Gary in Green Bay.

“How do you take that type of character, take what you can use and be able to pass that on? … Those characteristics that Kevin (Greene) had, that Reggie had that they gave to me,” Rucker says. “That, to me, is worth more than any sack total, than any Super Bowl. Your legacy is still living on. Reggie White’s legacy is still living on at the Carolina Panthers because of that lineage. And that’s on the field and off the field.”

(Illustration: Wes McCabe / The Athletic; photo: George Gojkovich / Getty Images)

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