Fans would purchase tickets merely to see Joe Schmidt when the Lions last won an NFL championship.
After 92 years of life, Joe Schmidt’s voice, which formerly oversaw the Detroit Lions defense, has grown softer.From his Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, home, the Hall of Fame middle linebacker expressed gratitude for being remembered.
Given that Schmidt was the focal point of a championship defense and a bona fide NFL star in his day, his genuine humility was unexpected. He was Dick Butkus before the football world ever heard of him; he was undersized and overachieving.
As an avid Lions fan who grew up watching Detroit win its most recent NFL championship in 1957 as a teenager, longtime coach Jerry Glanville said of the defensive player, “He was the only one that people would buy tickets for just to see him play at that time.”
Fans carry Joe Schmidt of the Lions off the field after the team wins the 1957 NFL championship.
(Source: Getty Images/Marvin E. Newman)
“People would purchase tickets in order to witness a running back or quarterback. But many would purchase tickets to see Joe Schmidt perform if he were visiting their city.
The championship trophy was essentially passed back and forth between Detroit and Cleveland in the 1950s, with the Lions taking home the trophy in 1952, 1953, and 1957, and the Browns in 1950, 1954, and 1955.
While there were other teams that embodied grind-it-out tenacity, such as the Rams in 1951, the New York Giants in 1956, and the Baltimore Colts in 1958 and 1959, Detroit and Cleveland stood out above the rest.
Two of the four teams that haven’t made it to the Super Bowl are the Lions and the Browns. Who would have thought that more than sixty years later?
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In the NFC championship game on Sunday, Detroit hopes to alter that. This will be the Lions’ second conference title appearance since the Super Bowl era began. Detroit will play in San Francisco. The first was a 41-10 loss against the Washington Redskins during the 1991 season.Schmidt is among the few remaining players from that 1957 championship team that destroyed the Browns 59-14 at Detroit’s Briggs Stadium.
In 1958 at the Coliseum, Lions linebacker Joe Schmidt (56) returned a kick against the Rams.
(Photo courtesy of Getty Images.)
That team didn’t make it happen. “We’ll play well today, and we’ll take tomorrow off,” said Schmidt, who is a generous 6 feet 2 inches in height and 220 pounds. “We always played with intensity.”
Schmidt, a strong player at Pitt, played 13 seasons for the Lions (1953–1965), making it to the Pro Bowl ten times in a row. He was chosen twice as the most valuable defensive player in the NFL. In 1973, he was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame and chosen for the NFL’s All-Decade team for the 1950s.
Following his playing retirement following the 1965 season, he managed the Lions from 1967 to 1972. He also starred in the 1968 motion picture “Paper Lion” as himself.
In 1968, Detroit Lions coach Joe Schmidt and Wayne Walker observed the offense versus the Packers from close quarters.(Associated Press, unattributed)
He said, “Because I had no experience with that type of stuff, acting made me uneasy.” “Everyone would be observing what you were doing from a distance. It wasn’t frightening at all, but you were afraid of making a mistake or seeming foolish.”
The way Schmidt approached the game had no Hollywood feel to it.
Matt Millen, an NFL linebacker who won four Super Bowls and later served as the Lions president, noted that there are individuals like Joe from the early days who were harder than anybody ever imagined.
“To take what they had and their striking technique and go play? There were no regulations against touching the quarterback. Keeping? Are you joking with me? Most likely, the call was mauling. Although it was a very different game from what it is today, it was the prototype.
Just as the players’ teeth were not strictly enforced, neither were the regulations.
