MIAMI — Turning to his left and looking to make a play, Nick Mullens tried to flip a screen pass in a meaningless December game between the San Francisco 49ers and the Denver Broncos in 2018, only to have Shelby Harris, a defensive tackle for the Broncos, knock the pass off its trajectory.
As the ball hung in the air, Joe Staley saw his opportunity.
Staley, the longest-tenured player on the San Francisco 49ers and a six-time Pro Bowler at left tackle, knew exactly what to do in that situation: knock the ball down. But instead of doing the right thing, Staley snatched the ball, spun to his left and plowed forward — and was tackled for a 5-yard loss. He then rose to his feet and celebrated as if he had scored a game-winning touchdown.
Big man with the rock 💪 @jstaley74 pic.twitter.com/O5lqFBAsgB
— The Checkdown (@thecheckdown) December 9, 2018
“The correct thing to do is bat it down,” Staley acknowledged to reporters after the game. “But a lineman sees the ball in the air and you’re not not going to catch it, right? It’s like telling me, ‘Hey, there’s pizza here, but don’t have a slice.’”
The 49ers won that game, improving to 3-10, but Coach Kyle Shanahan suggested that Staley might be in line for a fine, adding that the play had revealed a certain character flaw in Staley, then 34.
“Joe refuses to fully believe he’s an O-lineman,” Shanahan said. “He’s always trying to show us how athletic he is.”
Of course, Staley, who will be protecting quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo’s blind side against the Kansas City Chiefs in the Super Bowl on Sunday, was not always an offensive lineman. When he arrived at Central Michigan in 2004, he was a 230-pound tight end who had been a track star at Rockford High School in Michigan. And even after the Chippewas asked him to bulk up and play tackle — a process that saw Staley gain around 75 pounds — he retained much of his agility and burst.
“He still runs like it,” Garoppolo said when asked about Staley’s days as a track star. “Dude can fly and he’ll let you know about it, too.”
It is not all talk. At his pro day in 2007, Staley’s 20-yard split in the 40-yard dash was just 0.01 of a second slower than the one recorded by Kansas City’s Travis Kelce in 2013, and just 0.08 slower than the one recorded by San Francisco’s George Kittle in 2017, despite the 305-pound Staley’s outweighing both All-Pro tight ends by 50 pounds.
Staley argues he could still play tight end, but he doesn’t expect to have his number called anytime soon. “It wouldn’t be smart,” he said. “We have a pretty good one right now.”
When told about that comment, Kittle concurred.
“One-hundred percent,” he said. “I am holding Joe Staley back.”
Getting Big
Super Bowls are typically littered with tales of random connections, but few can match a parallel between this year’s teams: Both the 49ers and the Chiefs have starting left tackles who were first-round picks out of Central Michigan, and both gained more than 75 pounds in college to make that happen. It is just the second time in 54 Super Bowls that both starting left tackles came from the same college, a rarity made especially surprising since Kansas City’s Eric Fisher and San Francisco’s Staley are the only first-round picks in Central Michigan’s long history.
Staley came first, after being recruited as a tight end and then starring as a tackle. He put in countless hours with the team’s strength coach, Paul Longo, and that helped lead San Francisco to select him with the 28th pick in the 2007 draft. At the time, he was the highest draft pick in Central Michigan history.
A few years after Staley left campus, Fisher arrived as an unheralded left tackle who stood 6 feet 7 inches but weighed only 225 pounds. Fisher, who described Staley as an inspiration, bulked his way up to 306 pounds before the 2013 N.F.L. combine, and was rewarded for that effort when Kansas City selected him with the first overall pick in the draft — making him just the fifth offensive lineman in the draft’s 84-year history to receive that distinction.
Plas Presnell, who spent 31 years as an assistant coach, recruiter and football operations manager for Central Michigan’s football program, said it was no coincidence that Staley and Fisher had gone through such radical transformations during their years in Mount Pleasant. As a Mid-American Conference program that did not have the recruiting machines of college football’s heavy hitters, Central Michigan had to look for players who had the frame for a position, even if they were still lacking the necessary bulk.
“A lot of coaches want a finished product, a kid that’s close to 300 pounds in high school,” Presnell said. “So a guy like Joe would get passed up. Same thing with Eric. But you see the structure of their body, you watch them on film and see their athleticism, and you know what you can get.”
The methods by which the players bulked up, however, were different.
Staley described a painstaking approach to adding 25 pounds a year, which involved going to some extremes.
“I was waking myself up at like 2 in the morning having huge, huge weight-gainer shakes,” he said. Coach Brian Kelly, now at Notre Dame, gave Staley a simple mantra: “Eat everything you can.”
For Fisher, who arrived at college skinnier than many wide receivers, the change in size had more to do with access to Central Michigan’s meal plan than any sort of well-orchestrated effort.
“It was the first time in my life that I could eat whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted,” he said. “It was pretty nice.”
Staying Big?
In a league that grapples with obesity problems, particularly among retired players, tales of young men making a concerted effort to gain the weight of a full-size punching bag opens up a larger question of what happens after they stop playing football.
Joe Thomas, a retired left tackle who starred for the Cleveland Browns, said he had added 70 pounds to his natural frame to compete at the pro level. The thing he had most looked forward to about retirement, he said, was the ability to eat only when he was hungry, and his transformation over the last two years could serve as something of a model for both Staley and Fisher after their playing days. He is more than 50 pounds lighter since leaving the N.F.L. after the 2017 season.
“I reversed everything I was doing,” Thomas said. “No more freezer pizzas before bed.”
While Fisher said he believed his weight had been added in a natural way and that he didn’t struggle to maintain it, Staley — the track star who once ran the 200 in 21.9 seconds — said that he still felt like a smaller man who had to endure food he didn’t love in order to maintain bulk.
“I love organic stuff, but I am an offensive lineman,” he said. “So if I were to eat completely healthy all the time, then I would not be an offensive lineman anymore.”
Dropping weight would undoubtedly be good for his palate, and for his long-term health, but he showed his cards a bit by adding that if he were to lose that weight, he could probably just play tight end instead.
Staley’s Time to Shine?
Staley and Fisher praised each other in interviews ahead of Sunday’s Super Bowl, and said they kept in touch thanks to their Central Michigan connection. The parallels between them have continued, as the remarkably durable players struggled with injuries this season, only to round back into Pro Bowl-worthy shape in time for the playoffs.
But in an evenly matched game between superb teams, any element of surprise could be the difference between a win or a loss — which inspired a question to San Francisco’s players about whether Staley, in a season that set a record for receiving touchdowns by 300-pound players, could contribute in the passing game if the 49ers needed him.
“Of course,” said Emmanuel Sanders, a veteran wide receiver. “You see his footwork? You see the way he moves?”
Nick Bosa, San Francisco’s star rookie at defensive end, offered Staley’s 40-yard dash time off the top of his head, and Garoppolo brought up Staley’s time in the 200, saying he would not be surprised by any of his left tackle’s athletic feats.
Garoppolo’s camera-ready smile took a brief recess, however, when he was asked if that meant he would be O.K. with having a play called for Staley, and he deadpanned, “I didn’t say that.”
But Presnell, who has known Staley for nearly 20 years, said the only thing missing was opportunity. Asked if Staley would catch a ball thrown his way, Presnell was emphatic.
“There is no doubt,” he said.
Ken Belson contributed reporting.
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