National Football League

Pro Football 101: Larry Allen ranks No. 44 on all-time list

Updated Apr. 27, 2022 5:07 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. 44, Larry Allen.

Larry Allen was probably the strongest man in NFL history.

There’s no way to know for sure, of course; it’s not even clear what "strongest" means when it comes to football. I mean, Titans bruising running back Derrick Henry is obviously strong in his way, New Orleans' Swiss Army knife back Alvin Kamara is absurdly strong in his way, Rams defensive tackle Aaron Donald is super strong in his way, Washington tight end Vernon Davis is famously strong in his way.

But when you talk about "strong" in the aggregate, as in, "Which player is most likely to pick up that Jeep Cherokee over there?" well, let’s let the late, great John Madden explain.

"When you say ‘strong,’" Madden once told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, "Larry Allen may have been the strongest guy who ever played. If you were to have a game, and you were going to choose up sides, and you weren’t sure exactly what the rules were, boxing or wrestling or football, you’d choose Larry Allen."

When it comes to Allen’s greatness, you don’t really want to talk about his offensive line technique, though he was as technically sound as anybody. He played every position on the line except center, gave up only 3.2 sacks per season — the best of any offensive lineman of his era — and was called for holding just 13 times in 207 starts.

Still, with Allen, you talk about muscle, and you talk about heart.

"I just wanted to make the other guy give up," Allen said.

We start with the heart. Allen almost died of meningitis when he was a baby. He grew up in Compton, California — "It’s rough out there," he said of his childhood — and at age 10, while defending his brother from a neighbor, he was stabbed 12 times in the head, shoulder and neck. He told the rest of the story at his Hall of Fame induction.

"Three months later, my mother said, ‘I’m not raising any punks,’ so she made me fight this guy. She said, ‘You will fight him until you win.’ First day, I lost. Second day, I lost. The third day, I finally won. That was one of the most valuable lessons I learned in my life, never to back down from anybody.

"I carried that lesson through my whole career. I just knew I had to win every play."

That was how Allen played. His path to the NFL was wild. He went to four different high schools. He was talented enough to play Division I football right out of high school, but he didn’t have the grades and instead went to Butte Junior College in California. Then, after taking a year off, he went to Division II Sonoma State. He was so good there — allowing one sack in two seasons — that when the Cowboys took him in the second round of the 1994 draft, he became the first football player ever drafted out of Sonoma State.

Then there was the muscle — and you can start with the fact that in 2001, he bench-pressed 700 pounds, a feat so mind-numbing that the clip of it has received more than three million hits on YouTube.

In 2006, he led off the NFL Strongest Man Competition; competitors were asked to bench 225 pounds as many times as they could.

"What’s your strategy?" ESPN's Suzy Kolber asked Allen.

"I’m just going to keep going until I can’t go anymore," he said.

He then bench-pressed 225 pounds 43 times, a number so staggering that the other competitors simply laughed when it was their turn.

That strength was legendary on the field. Remember when I said that with Larry Allen, you don’t want to talk about technique? That’s because you wouldn’t try to teach anyone else to play offensive line like Larry Allen did. Nobody else could do what he did.

"Man, he’ll grab you, pick you up and start laughing," Hall of Fame defensive tackle John Randle said.

"He picked me up!" former defensive lineman and ESPN analyst Marcus Spears said on Chris Long’s podcast. "I’m sitting down, see. I’m 310, bro! I sit and spin, he picks me up, and Larry and Flozell [Adams] usher me into the end zone."

"The guy scared people," Hall of Fame tackle Jonathan Ogden said. "I don’t know if I scared people on the field. I mean, they weren’t going to get by me, and I intimidated them. But I’ve seen defensive linemen develop cramps because they didn’t want this guy on them."

"Happened all the time," Hall of Fame running back Emmitt Smith said. "We called it the 'Allen Flu.’"

"I’ve seen him take linebackers," Randle said, "and drive them 20 yards. Not five. Not 10. Twenty yards. And you go back in the huddle, that linebacker’s looking at you going, ‘What am I supposed to do?’"

"I’ll never forget my first practice," said five-time All-Pro linebacker Patrick Willis, Allen’s former teammate in San Francisco. "Frank Gore ran the sweep, and Larry Allen was coming off the block. I thought I could just make a move on him and go around him. Uh, that didn’t happen. I felt like Larry Allen pushed me from one side of the field to the other."

That was when Willis was a 22-year-old rookie and Allen was 36 and entering his last season.

The 6-foot-3, 335-pound Allen was larger than everyone and larger than life. Defensive linemen say that before the snap, they would sometimes hear Allen make a train sound, indicating that a run was coming, and it was going to be coming right behind him. He didn’t care if they knew. The element of surprise was not part of Larry Allen’s game. He wanted you to know exactly how he was going to run you over.

"The way I saw it," he would say, "my job was to make my opponent want to quit."

There’s a wonderful YouTube video of Allen having perhaps the greatest drive any offensive lineman has ever had. It was Halloween 1999, Cowboys vs. Colts, and if you watch it, you will know everything you need to know about Allen’s greatness.

On one Emmitt Smith running play, Allen turned Colts defensive tackle Ellis Johnson and drove him into the ground.

"Did you see that Larry Allen there?" John Madden said, laughing. "That is called a pancake."

On the next play, Johnson lined up as low as he could so as not to get turned. Allen simply climbed on Johnson’s back and dropped, pile-driving the poor guy into the turf. "Ellis Johnson is a good player," Madden said. "He simply doesn’t know what to do."

Johnson was a good player. He played 10 years in the NFL, played in 149 games. But he had no chance. On the next play, Johnson was able at least to stay on his feet, But Allen just moved him five yards out of the way, opening up a gigantic hole for Emmitt. You just know that at this point, Johnson was wondering why he had not contracted the Allen Flu.

And on the touchdown play, Allen came around on the sweep — it was easy to miss because of his great strength, but he ran a 4.85 40-yard dash — smashed into All-Pro Cornelius Bennett and slammed the guy backward five yards into his own man. "He knocked him right out of the picture!" Madden shouted.

It’s easy to miss that Allen actually played for some pretty bad teams in his career. It’s easy to miss that because he joined the Cowboys right in the middle of their dominance and was a big part of their third Super Bowl victory in 1995. But after that, the Cowboys were mostly pretty bad, and he spent his last two seasons playing for a bad 49ers team. Even in his legendary 1999 game, the Cowboys lost.

There’s only so much any one offensive lineman can do. But Larry Allen did all he could.

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 last September.