Klecko’s Hall Of Fame Enshrinement Was Long Overdue

Manny Rubio-USA TODAY Sports

It was about time.

Thirty years after his initial eligibility, Joe Klecko will be inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in August.

The two-time All-Pro defensive lineman, who played 11 of his 12 season with the Jets, will share the honor with former Gang Green cornerback Darelle Revis, who was always deemed a shoo-in on his first ballot.  

For Klecko—and long-time Jets fans who remember how dominant he was across the d-line—better late than never. Injuries curtailed what could have been a record-setting career—he amassed 53 sacks in his first five seasons, including 20.5 in 1981 (sack totals were unofficial until the following season) when he finished second to Giants legend Lawrence Taylor in the voting for the NFL’s Defensive Player of the Year. His unofficial total of 78 sacks would tie him for 127^th place all-time; who knows how many more he would have accumulated had he been able to stay healthy.

Klecko stood out the most during the short-lived days of the New York Sack Exchange in the early 1980s. Though defensive end Mark Gastineau received most of the attention for his self-aggrandizing dancing and his 22 sacks in 1984, an NFL record that stood until Green Bay quarterback Brett Favre fell while in the presence of the Giants Michael Strahan 18 years later, I was always more of a Klecko fan.

Klecko embodied the cliché of the hard-working underdog—he was the Jets’ sixth round pick in the 1977 Draft out of Temple and took off with eight sacks as a rookie. Few players had his motor. In his younger years, he could beat tackles off the edge with both speed and power. When his injured knees started to limit his mobility, the Jets moved him inside to a 4-3 defensive tackle in 1983 and then to a 3-4 nose tackle two years later. No problem—he became the first defensive player in league history to be selected to the Pro Bowl at three different positions.

My recollections of Klecko are mostly from his years on the ball, where his ridiculous get-off time proved to be constant disruptions to offenses (except for the times he jumped offsides). I really thought he might one day intercept a snap, the way former baseball pitcher Satchel Paige once said that Cool Papa Bell was so fast he could turn off the lights and be in bed before the room got dark. That was how quick Klecko was. Even when Klecko was playing on one leg, it took multiple blockers to keep him at bay, allowing Jets linebackers to pile up their tackles numbers.

The injuries weren’t Klecko’s only misfortune when it came to Hall of Fame voting. He played for the Jets, a generally lousy franchise that qualified for the playoffs just three times in his career. All but the 1982 postseason were one-and-done’s. Had the Dolphins properly tarped their Orange Bowl turf in the AFC Championship Game, the Jets might have reached a Super Bowl and then Klecko would have become more of a household name around the rest of the country.  Instead, he might have been more famous for his small roles in four Burt Reynolds movies than for his outstanding football prowess.

For those who whine about New Yor bias, Revis and Klecko are just the sixth and seventh primary Jets players to reach the Hall of Fame, and it took the Senior committee 25 years to give Klecko his due. It should have been galling to all football fans that the committee made Klecko wait that long.

Jets fans rarely get the opportunity to celebrate any form of success, so the fact that wide receiver Garrett Wilson and cornerback Ahmad “Sauce Gardner also earned the Offensive and Defensive Rookie of the Year awards, the third time teammates swept those awards since they began in 1967, in the same program as the induction announcement made Thursday night extra special.

Anything to make us forget about the games.