National Football League

Pro Football 101: Walter Jones ranks No. 51 on all-time list

Updated Feb. 9, 2022 6:58 p.m. ET

By Joe Posnanski
Special to FOX Sports

Editor's Note: Throughout 2021 and 2022, Joe Posnanski is ranking the 101 best players in pro football history, in collaboration with FOX Sports. Posnanski will publish a detailed look at all 101 players on Substack. The countdown continues today with player No. 51, Walter Jones.

Michael Lewis is not just a writer. He’s a wizard. Here’s my proof: He has written two books — "Moneyball" and "The Big Short" — that had no business becoming movies.

One is a book about a baseball front office trying to use analytics to overcome its inherent financial disadvantage. The other is a book about some offbeat characters who saw the 2008 financial collapse coming.

Neither has boy meets girl, neither has a murder to solve, neither has a superhero, neither has what you could really call a happy ending (in "Moneyball," the movie ends with the A’s beating the Royals in the regular season; "The Big Short" ends with the country in financial ruin).

Yet both movies not only were made but also are good.

And the reason, I think, is that Michael Lewis can make anything fascinating.

And this includes left tackles.

Walter Jones was Seattle's left tackle for 12 seasons and made nine Pro Bowls. (Photo by Jamie Squire/Getty Images)

When Lewis wrote "The Blind Side: Evolution of the Game," he was telling two stories. One, poignantly, was the unlikely story of Michael Oher, who grew up in difficult circumstances, was adopted and developed into a star offensive lineman. This actually was something of a movie plot.

But the other story was about the left tackle, which for sports fans had to be among the most anonymous positions in sports, but for NFL teams had become one of the most important positions in all of football, maybe even the second-most important position after quarterback.

And this is because the left tackle protects the quarterback’s blind side.

Michael Lewis tracks all this back to Lawrence Taylor’s famous and infamous blindside sack of Joe Theismann on Monday Night Football, the one that snapped Theismann’s leg in half.

"The fans, naturally, more interested in effect than cause, follow the ball and come away thinking they know perfectly well what happened," Lewis wrote. "But what happened to the ball, and the person holding the ball, was just the final link in a chain of events that began well before the ball was snapped. At the beginning of the chain that ended Joe Theismann’s career was an obvious question: Who was meant to bock Lawrence Taylor?"

And so, Lawrence Taylor retired in the early 1990s. Here are the left tackles who were All-Pro from 1996 through 2006 — call them the "Walter Jones Years."

1996: Gary Zimmerman (Hall of Fame), Willie Roaf (Hall of Fame)

1997: Tony Boselli, Jonathan Ogden (Hall of Fame)

1998: Boselli, Larry Allen (his only year at left tackle; Hall of Fame)

1999: Boselli, Orlando Pace (Hall of Fame)

2000: Ogden, Pace, Roaf

2001: Walter Jones (Hall of Fame), Ogden, Pace

2002: Jones, Ogden, Tra Thomas

2003: Ogden, Pace, Roaf

2004: Jones, Pace, Roaf

2005; Jones, Roaf

2006: Jammal Brown, Jones, Ogden

What a golden era of left tackles.

Who was the best of them in this golden age?

Walter Jones certainly has a case.

Jones was flagged for holding only nine times in his career, an average of fewer than once per season. (Photo by Otto Greule Jr/Getty Images)

He was extremely quiet. Maybe that came from being the seventh of eight children growing up in the small farming town of Aliceville, Alabama, about 30 miles west of Tuscaloosa. He was absolutely enormous right from the start — 12 pounds at birth! — and at his size, it was more or less inevitable that football would come into his life.

As a billboard of Jones outside of Aliceville said: "He grew up in Aliceville, and boy, did he grow up!"

He didn’t love football, though, not for a long time. Surely people mentioned the sport to him, surely people asked him to play, but it wasn’t until the ninth grade that he considered it. And that’s a wonderful story. As Jones tells is, the Aliceville football coach, Pierce McIntosh, approached him and asked if he had ever thought about playing football. He said no. For one thing, he was a terrific basketball player.*

* As a basketball player in high school, he shattered a backboard with a dunk.

And for another, his brother had been badly hurt playing football, and Walter Jones just wasn’t interested in all that.

Still, McIntosh asked him to work out for him. He had Jones run around a bit, hit a blocking sled, run a few plays. The workout couldn’t have lasted more than a few minutes.

Afterward, Jones asked what he thought.

"I think," McIntosh responded, "you’re a million dollars walking around broke."

How about that? Jones’ transcendent talents as an offensive lineman were so obvious that it took a coach in Aliceville only a blink to recognize them. And, sure enough, Jones began playing football, and he loved it — he found he was much bigger and much faster than every defensive player who came up against him. They stood no chance.

Then came all sorts of complications. He fell behind in his classes and was declared academically ineligible to play his senior year. He dedicated himself to his studies and got his grades up but was still told he was academically ineligible. And so he shipped off to a tiny Christian boarding school called French Camp somewhere in central Mississippi, an hour and a half south of Tupelo and an hour and a half north of Jackson.

He didn’t play football at French Camp. He just tried to get his academic situation squared away so that he could go play for Bobby Bowden at Florida State. Bowden had already seen all he needed to see about Jones’ extraordinary skill.

But it wasn’t easy getting academically eligible, which led to a whole other bit of serendipity. Hugh Shurden, an assistant coach at Holmes Community College — about 45 minutes along the Natchez Parkway from French Camp — was making the rounds for talent, and he was told about Jones. Shurden had never heard of him, but he took one look and invited Jones to meet with the school’s head coach, Robert Pool.

"As soon as I walked into the office," Jones would say, "he offered me a scholarship."

"Yeah," Pool said. "He passed the eye test."

You just couldn’t miss it — Jones was 6-foot-5, approaching his NFL playing weight of 325 pounds, and he just looked like an athlete. And the looks were real; Big Walt was an athlete. He was so fast that Pool played him at tight end some of the time. Bowden wanted to play him at tight end at Florida State, too, but, as he said, "He just got too doggone big."

Jones famously worked out by pushing a sports utility vehicle uphill. Walter Payton used to run up mountains. Jerry Rice used to run pattern after pattern in his own footsteps. Walter Jones pushed SUVs.

I’m not sure that shoving those SUVs is the reason, but nobody — and I mean nobody — could drive a defender quite the way Jones could. Observe the play at 1:25 of this awe-inspiring highlights video:

This particular play comes from a playoff game, Seahawks vs. Panthers, in 2005. As you see, the handoff goes to Shaun Alexander, who became the NFL record holder for most rushing touchdowns in a season that year. He got the bulk of those touchdowns running left behind Walter Jones.

And on this play, Alexander runs left behind Jones, who is locked up with Carolina’s Pro Bowl defensive end, Mike Rucker.

Jones gets control of Rucker at the 23-yard marker and begins pushing him forward. Rucker was 6-foot-5, 275 pounds, an NFL force before an ACL injury essentially ended his career. But as you can see, with Jones driving forward, Rucker is nothing but a prisoner of inertia. He moves backward way faster than he wants and keeps going backward and still keeps going backward until finally he is driven into the turf at the 3.

Jones had pushed him for 20 yards.

As Greg Bishop wrote in Sports Illustrated, that’s the only play you need to see to understand why Jones was a first-ballot Hall of Famer.

Mike Holmgren called Jones the best offensive player he ever coached — not the best offensive lineman but the best offensive player, and this guy coached Brett Favre, Sterling Sharpe, Antonio Freeman, Dorsey Levens, Shaun Alexander, Steve Hutchinson, etc. Bowden said Jones was the most complete player to ever show up on the Florida State campus; he was basically an All-American on day one. You can find a million quotes like this about Jones.

Former Seahawks coach Mike Holmgren called Jones the best offensive player he ever coached. (Photo by Otto Greule Jr/Getty Images)

And the reason is that as great a run-blocker as he was — go watch that Rucker block again — what separated him even from other Hall of Famers was his incredible pass-blocking. He was the guardian of the blind side.

And he did it his own way. It’s not like Jones was a textbook pass-blocker; coaches used to say that you would never want to teach anyone how to block using Walter Jones film.

That’s because he could do stuff nobody else could do.

He relied on two things as a pass-blocker — intense film study and otherworldly nimbleness.

Because he studied his opponent so carefully and thoroughly, he knew exactly what they wanted to do to beat him.

Because he was as quick as any big man to ever play the game — Bishop wrote that he was so light on his feet, coaches could not even hear his footsteps as he ran by — he was able to get to the spot before his defender.

This meant that not only did Jones not give up sacks, but he was also almost never out of position and — as such — was almost never called for holding. Of all the incredible numbers that describe Walter Jones’ career, the number nine probably says it best. That’s how many times he was called for holding in 180 career games. That’s one hold per 20 games — fewer than one hold per season.

He always got there first.

Joe Posnanski is a New York Times bestselling author and has been named the best sportswriter in America by five different organizations. His latest book, "The Baseball 100," came out Sept. 28.