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Bob Sturm 3h ago
Welcome to the NFL 100, The Athletic’s endeavor to identify the 100 best players in football history. 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.
It has been a long time since he played in the NFL, so memories of the Manster on the football field will belong only to those at least 40 years of age.
It was an awesome nickname for Randy White that basically meant “half-man, half-monster.” And it fit perfectly because few men terrified opponents as he did. He was one of the scariest men to ever play in the NFL — no small feat for a 265-pound defensive tackle.
However good you believe White was, he was probably even better than that. That’s because he played during an era when record-keeping was not quite where it needed to be. The NFL started counting sacks as an official statistic in 1982. Therefore, when you search the career sack leaders of the Cowboys franchise, you will be led astray with nonsense that would suggest Jim Jeffcoat, Greg Ellis and Tony Tolbert have more sacks than White. This claim might then be interpreted by younger generations that they had a more destructive impact on the line of scrimmage than the Manster, who somehow was able to manage that awesome nickname with only 52 career sacks.
Absurd.
John Turney of ProFootballJournal.com used play-by-play records dating to 1960 and searched for the lost 22 years of sacks. He concedes that he is depending on those records to be accurate. They are not always perfect, but those manual records work much better than suggesting some of those pre-1982 moments never happened. They did, and they should be counted.
According to the NFL official records, the great Harvey Martin and two-year edge George Selvie both have 10 career sacks as Cowboys and are tied. You certainly must know Martin had that in a single season several times over — he even had 20 in one season. The top five sack leaders in Cowboys history, according to the “official” stats, would be DeMarcus Ware (117), Jeffcoat (94.5), Ellis (77), Tolbert (59) and Ed “Too Tall” Jones (57.5).
Turney, after studying tape, records and statistics, has adjusted those totals with his work and restored sanity to a proper list of all-time Cowboys sack leaders: Ware (117), Martin (114), White (111), Jones (106) and George Andrie (97). You can now find those unofficial numbers posted on Pro Football Reference so that fewer young football enthusiasts are led astray.
The key here, though, is that everyone on that list rushed off the edge except for White. He was an inside and undersized defensive tackle. No defensive tackle in the history of this franchise approached his 111 career sacks: Jethro Pugh had 96.5, Bob Lilly 95.5, and after that the list drops considerably. That total is good for third-best all time at his position regardless of franchise. The only two men ahead of him — Alan Page (148.5) and John Randle (135.5) — are also Pro Football Hall of Famers.
By today’s standards, we know what a dominant defensive tackle looks like. Modern-day Aaron Donald is unlike anything we have seen, with 20.5 sacks in 2018 from the defensive tackle position. His size, quickness and motor should remind people of what White once was. Donald weighs less than 285 pounds. But, again, White was 265 — tiny even for his era.
That is because he entered the league as a linebacker. White was originally supposed to succeed Lee Roy Jordan at middle linebacker when he was drafted at No. 2 in 1975 (behind Steve Bartkowski and two picks in front of Walter Payton). But that didn’t quite work out due to Dallas’ flex defense. White felt off-kilter. “(It) went against your natural instincts,” he said.
That’s when Tom Landry came up with an unconventional solution.
“Coach Landry called me in his office and told me, ‘Randy, we’re thinking about moving you to defensive tackle. What do you think?’” White said. “I told him, ‘Coach, I just want to play football. I will play wherever you put me. Just give me a chance to play.’”
That eagerness from a man still wearing that linebacker’s No. 54, though, quickly turned into trepidation.
“I’m looking and I’m going, ‘OK, we have Ed Jones and Harvey Martin and the middle linebacker job, I didn’t do too good there, so if I don’t make it at the tackle spot where am I going to go?’” he said. “So it was kind of desperation mode for me.”
White immediately got to work, putting in extra sessions before and after practice with defensive line coach Ernie Stautner, himself a nine-time Pro Bowl pick at the position. Then he applied whatever lessons he could from his middle linebacker days to make the new position his own.
White certainly had the ability. He had the work ethic. But he needed more to rise to the very top of the league and become an All-Pro every single year from 1977 to 1985. If you talk to any player who played with or against him over those years, they would tell you that without question, White was ahead of his time with his hand skills. The ability to shed blocks, defeat his opponent, yet keep his hands from holding is an art form that was barely birthed in the 1970s.
“I don’t think there is any question that he was ahead of his time with his hands,” said Kurt Peterson, a Cowboys guard from 1980 to 1987 and, consequently, a frequent practice opponent of White’s.
Then there was the persona. A review of White’s career makes it clear that the Manster moniker was based largely on the pure fear he inspired among his adversaries. Intimidation was an art form, and the popular memories seem largely based on his ability to terrify his opponents with a skill set and a disposition that kept those unlucky foes up at night.
“Before you played the Cowboys, you heard it from everyone in the league: Randy White, he is the intimidator of football,” Redskins offensive lineman Mark May, a longtime opponent, told NFL Films. “He was a fierce competitor … he was half monster. Most tackles didn’t have the tenacity and the athletic ability that he had.”
What wasn’t clear, though, is what made up the totality of White’s greatness. Was it a ridiculous God-given athletic ability we had seldom seen? Was it his advanced pass-rush techniques? Was it his intimidation? Was it his work rate, motor and endurance that allowed him to excel when others were tired?
The answers vary because defining greatness is never simple and those categories bleed into each other. But when someone has better skills and is willing to work harder and longer to win the battles, signs of weakness aren’t often shown. This is where Hall of Fame-level careers can be found.
Then, the conditioning White had and that relentless motor would allow him to do something that always benefited him: It put him inside the heads of his opponents.
“When a guy gets tired — I don’t care how big, strong and fast a guy is — when he gets tired and you are not, you can beat him,” White said. “That was one of my plans. I always trained hard. I wanted to go in the fourth quarter when my opponent gets tired.”
All of it made for one heck of a show.
“One thing that made him different was that we as offensive linemen had to take a knee on the sideline and watch him play. We only did that for a couple guys like Walter Payton and Earl Campbell,” said Peterson, citing White’s signature play of chasing down Eagles receiver Scott Fitzkee as a prime example. “Randy, on game day, was just relentless.”
His name is Randy White. His nickname — Manster. If offensive guards could peer into his eyes and read his mind, they would all quit the game. For no one man can keep No. 54 from his appointed rounds.
