What goes on beneath the NFL pile
Buckle up your chin strap, dear reader. This is not Cheap Jerseys a story for the faint of heart. We're diving into the NFL pile, a place where rules are abandoned and no body part is safe.
The pursuit of a fumbled ball is, by all accounts, football's final frontier the wild, wild mess. While games might be endlessly televised, replayed and legislated, the pile remains the one place on the field shielded from prying eyes.
"Man, it's no holds barred," said Minnesota Vikings defensive end Jared Allen, the Los Gatos native. "Everything happens. I bet that ball changes hands 15 times down there."
The Pile, as it shall be known, is football's reverse meritocracy; a place where people are constantly striving to get to the bottom. To get there, players will resort to eye gouging, arm twisting and well placed pokes. It's a "Three Stooges" routine with shoulder pads.
It also happens to hold the key to the NFL playoffs, which begin this weekend. The top three teams in the league in turnover differential the 49ers (plus 28), Green Bay Packers (plus 24) and New England Patriots (plus 17) went a combined 41 7 and earned first round byes. The 49ers' mark broke the franchise record of plus 22 set by the 1981 team, the one that launched San Francisco's dynasty.
To put it simply: Get the ball, get the win. Just ask New York Giants defensive lineman Dave Tollefson, who lived to tell about his game changing fumble recovery against the St. Louis Rams earlier this season.
"It's pure pandemonium," the former standout at Concord's Ygnacio Valley High told reporters. "You would think that the football had the key to life in it. Seriously. It's unlike anything I've ever been involved in sports."
As San Diego Chargers linebacker Takeo Spikes, a survivor of 18 career fumble recoveries, said: "If piles could only talk."
Today, Wholesale NFL Jerseys they do.
Here are true tales from football's sweaty underbelly.
'He tried to feel me'
The first rule of The Pile is that there are no rules. There is also no code of honor, no professional etiquette, no regard for human decency.
"No, no, no," Raiders defensive lineman Tommy Kelly said. "There are no other rules other than, 'Get it!' However you get it, get it. If you have to bite him, bite him."
Former 49ers and Raiders linebacker Bill Romanowski was not the kind of guy you'd want to meet at the bottom of a dark pile. Stokes' face and throwing a football at Bryan Cox's crotch.
So imagine what Romanowski did when shielded from view.
"I used to go to a pretty dark place, and there wasn't much that was off limits," Romanowski acknowledged. "I'm not proud of some of the things I did. But I just wanted to win so badly that I would do anything to get a piece of that ball and get it back."
In the January 1991 NFC Championship game between the 49ers and New York Giants, Romanowski was trying to pry the ball away from running back Dave Meggett. Let's allow Romanowski, now an analyst for Comcast SportsNet, to give the play by play: "I'm trying to rip the ball out of his hands and as I'm ripping, all I could get was a finger. I ripped as hard and as fast as I could and cracked his finger like a chicken bone."
That brazen, whatever is necessary attitude underscores an important fact about life on the bottom: The ball is changing possession, sometimes frequently. That helps explain the ritual dance that plays out on The Pile's fringes, when players from each team signal with equal certitude that the ball belongs to them.
They might be right, if only for a fleeting moment. As Patriots coach Bill Belichick said: "It's not who gets the ball. It's who comes out with it." New England tied with the 49ers, the New Orleans Saints and the Buffalo Bills this season for fewest fumbles allowed (five).
Getting to the prize is the easiest part.
"You don't need no skill level to fall on a ball," the Raiders' Kelly added. In fact, the true challenge is Wholesale Jerseys enduring the outrageous indignities that occur once you have Wholesale NFL Jerseys the football. Explained Raiders quarterback Jason Campbell: "They're pulling. They're tugging. They're punching your gut. They're turning your neck."
"Guys do what they want to do," added Houston Texans running back Arian Foster. "I try to be as humane as possible when I play this game. Other people don't. You can't account for those."
Green Bay quarterback Aaron Rodgers accused Seattle defensive end Darryl Tapp of giving him a chomp during the 2008 season.
"It felt like a bee sting," Rodgers said. "I was looking down and he was biting my arm, so I had to get his teeth off my shoulder."
When Rodgers went public a season later, Tapp denied it, sort of.
"I'm pretty sure it didn't happen pretty positive," he said.
But Tapp's tactics have nothing on defensive end Shaun Smith, who was accused not once but twice of grabbing a particularly sensitive region of an opponent last season in scrums. After he claimed his second victim, the 49ers' Anthony Davis, and received a $10,000 fine, Smith became known in cyberspace as The Genital Giant.