WP:A Job With Plenty of Downtime

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A17386-2003Nov8.html

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A Job With Plenty of Downtime

For Quarterbacks, Getting Sacked Is All in a Day's Work

By Peter Carlson

Washington Post Staff Writer

Sunday, November 9, 2003; Page D01

Patrick Ramsey sees deadly people.

He sees them hovering around him while he's trying to work -- deadly, nasty, ugly men, thugs who are built like Humvees, hired goons with bad tattoos and necks as wide as your waist. They stare at him with sneering faces, their pitiless eyes betraying a deep desire to smash him to the ground and dance triumphantly over his battered body.

Ramsey is not a paranoid. He's a quarterback.

Unfortunately for his physical and mental well-being, Ramsey is a quarterback for the Washington Redskins, a team that cannot protect him from these thugs, who are the linebackers and defensive linemen of the National Football League. In this season's eight games, Ramsey has been sacked 26 times and knocked to the ground countless more. This afternoon, he'll face the Seattle Seahawks.

"He's lying on his back after virtually every play," says former Dallas Cowboys quarterback Troy Aikman, now a Fox TV football announcer.

This repeated pummeling takes its toll on a quarterback. "You start acting like a punch-drunk fighter," says Redskins announcer Sonny Jurgensen. "You take too much of that, you're gonna start drooling down your face."

Jurgensen knows the symptoms. He's been there. Back in the '50s and '60s, he quarterbacked a Philadelphia Eagles team that could not protect him from marauding linemen.

"I got hit seven straight times by Andy Robustelli of the New York Giants," he recalls. "He kept hitting me over and over, always from my blind side. After a while, he started yelling, 'Sonny, look out,' before he hit me because he didn't want to hurt me."

Getting sacked by a huge human moving at high speed can be, according to the calculations of University of Nebraska physics professor Tim Gay, roughly equal to getting hit by a bowling ball falling 130 feet.

It is, Jurgensen reveals, not a particularly pleasant experience. "Your lights go out, you're in a daze, you're seeing stars," he says. "They get you on the sideline and give you some smelling salts to clear the cobwebs out of your head."

Roger Staubach disagrees. "I never really was hurt in sacks," says the former Cowboys quarterback, who is now a real estate developer. "Sometimes I'd hit the turf and get a concussion, but it wasn't the sack that hurt me, it was the turf."

That is a distinction that might be discernible only to a man like Staubach, who suffered 12 concussions in his football career. Staubach is a veritable connoisseur of concussions, capable of parsing the difference between the bad ones and the very bad ones.

With a bad concussion, he says, "you're not lying out there unconscious. You're walking around but you're not able to get coherent."

With a real bad concussion, he says, "you get knocked out where you don't know anything -- the next thing you know, it's the third quarter and you're on the sideline."

Concussion or no concussion, getting sacked repeatedly can make a man a little jumpy, a tad nervous, a bit frazzled.

"When you're getting hit a lot, you start expecting it," says Jurgensen. "You get that deer-in-the-headlights look. You start rushing, forcing your throws, trying to avoid it."

"It definitely does affect you," says Aikman. "You start trying to get rid of the ball faster. You start not trusting your instincts when things go bad like that."

"I call it 'happy feet,' " says Bert Jones, the former Baltimore Colts quarterback. "You're looking to get out of there."

Jurgensen has a word for this condition -- "skitterish." It's like skittish, only more so.

"That's a good word," says L.C. Greenwood, the former Pittsburgh Steelers defensive end. "I was going to say 'scared,' but skitterish is a better word."

Defenders can see when a quarterback is getting skitterish, Greenwood says. "He has that nervous look in his eyes. He wants to get out from behind the center as quick as he can. He looks jumpy, you know? . . . He's been sacked a couple of times already and you can see him as he kind of peeks over at you because he knows you're coming."

Jurgensen says he has seen Ramsey looking skitterish. "He gets happy feet in the pocket. His drop, set and throw isn't the same as it usually is."

Football is a full-contact sport, of course, and all players get hit, but quarterbacks are particularly vulnerable. A quarterback looking to pass is standing upright with his arm raised like the Statue of Liberty and gazing downfield, like a ship's captain searching for land.

"If you're throwing the ball, you're exposed," says Jurgensen. "Your arms are out and you just get drilled."

"The quarterback's in an awkward position and he gets the hell knocked out of him, basically," says Lamar "Bubba" Tyer, the retired Redskins trainer. "Your hands get hurt when they hit the defender's shoulder pads or helmet. . . . You get your hips bruised or your elbows bruised or your fingers mashed in the artificial turf."

Artificial turf, Tyer says, is really just a carpet of fake grass atop of 3/4-inch foam pad that sits on asphalt. It makes for a rough landing zone for sacked quarterbacks.

"The quarterback, because of his position, usually falls on his back or on the back of his head," Tyer says. "That's probably why they get concussions."

And the defenders are bigger than ever. Back in the 1980s, William Perry, a 300-pound defensive lineman for the Chicago Bears, was considered so huge he was called "The Refrigerator." Now, plenty of linemen weigh 300 pounds and the bigger guys aren't mere refrigerators, they're more like walk-in freezers or industrial meat lockers.

"As players keep getting bigger and faster," says Gay, "the amount of energy that goes into a hit just keeps getting bigger and bigger."

Gay, the physics professor, presents "Physics of Football" lessons on the University of Nebraska scoreboard during halftimes at Cornhuskers games. Using Newton's Second Law of Motion -- force equals mass times acceleration -- Gay calculates the frightening force of sacks.

"If you get a big defensive end who really cleans out a quarterback, you've got a force of a half to three-quarters of a ton that he's gonna feel. The only reason that he survives is that he feels it for a very short time -- about a tenth of a second."

Such statistics sound scary to a layman, but they do nothing to melt the icy hearts of the glorified muggers who work for NFL defensive units. These folks loved to sack quarterbacks. To them, the joy of sacks is the most fun you can have with your clothes on.

"Defensive players live to hit the quarterback!" says Sam Huff, the legendary former linebacker and current Redskins announcer. "I've knocked out a few quarterbacks. You live for those moments."

Huff still gets excited recounting memorable sacks. "I knocked out Don Meredith!" he says, laughing. Meredith was the Cowboys quarterback in a game played in the Cotton Bowl in Dallas. "I called for a blitz. They weren't expecting me and Don Meredith was standing there with the ball and I just drilled him and sacked him and knocked him out of the game."

Linebackers and defensive linemen aren't sadists. Many are gentle, loving, peaceful souls off the field. It's just that they don't like quarterbacks. Your typical quarterback is a tall, handsome fellow who gets a lot of money and a lot of attention from the media and the opposite sex. "Quarterbacks get the cars and the coverage and the money," Huff says.

Meanwhile, your typical defensive lineman is a gargantuan gorilla, a fat guy built like a vending machine who scares women almost as much as he scares quarterbacks. In such circumstances, a sack can seem like a sweet victory in football's never-ending class war.

"The name of the game is get the quarterback," says Huff. "He's the chairman of the board. You know if you knock out the quarterback, you get the second-stringer in there."

For the Redskins, the second-string quarterback is Tim Hasselbeck, a man who had never thrown a pass in the NFL until last Sunday -- a fact that only serves to whet defenders' appetite for mauling Ramsey.

"Coaches say they never target people," says Tyer, "but I know that defensive players are saying, 'Let's go get him!' "

All season long, Ramsey has been mugged and mauled, pounded and pummeled, sacked, smacked and whacked. But if it makes him feel any better, he is not even close to setting an NFL record for absorbing punishment.

Currently, Ramsey is on a pace to be sacked 52 times this year. The record, set last year by David Carr of the hapless Houston Texans, was 76. On Ramsey's worst day this year -- Sept. 14, against the Atlanta Falcons -- he was sacked six times. The record is 12, set on two very bad days by Warren Moon of the Houston Oilers and Bert Jones.

As it happens, Jones is a neighbor of Ramsey back home in Rustin, La. "He and my son are dear friends," Jones says.

Jones's 12-sack day came on Oct. 26, 1980, when he was quarterbacking for the Colts against the St. Louis Cardinals. "We had an off day," he says, drolly.

He endured his dozen sacks that day without any injuries. "I was hurting in the same place I always hurt after the game," he says.

Where was that?

"Everywhere," he says.

Jones, who owns a Louisiana lumber business, is a funny man with an odd comic style -- he makes you ask for the punch line. "Patrick will be all right," he says. "He'll do the same thing I used to do every off-season."

What's that?

"Recover," he says.

He reveals that he has given Ramsey some hard-earned advice about coping with sacks in the NFL: "Go into the season a little heavier than you think you should."

Why is that?

"For the extra padding."

© 2003 The Washington Post Company