Marino, Young lead Canton Class of ‘05

Dan Marino took the long, straight road to the Hall of Fame. Steve Young traversed a long and winding route.

Both got to the football shrine this weekend thanks to often dominant performances that few NFL quarterbacks could match and few defenses could handle. Marino was the most prolific passer in league history, and Young brought an exciting brand of uninhibited play to the game.

They will join yet another quarterback, Benny Friedman, and Fritz Pollard as the Class of 2005. Friedman and Pollard were NFL pioneers.

“I don’t know that there’s much difference in playing the quarterback position, other than Steve was more mobile and ran more and probably didn’t go downfield that much,” Marino said. “The idea is the same: You got to get the ball to the receivers and not throw interceptions.”

For Young, naturally, the feeling is mutual.

“It’s kind of fun, because we’re bookends, right?” he said. “Dan is the epitome of one side and I’m the epitome of one side, our style. I think that there was a style that Dan had that was very much more traditional at the time. And I think that my style, while it wasn’t traditional when I started playing, I look around the league today, and absolutely, the quarterback can move around.”

Marino and Young both benefited from playing under Hall of Fame coaches. Indeed, while Marino probably would have succeeded in any situation, his working relationship with Don Shula catapulted him to his arm’s length worth of records.

Before drafting Marino with the 27th – yes, 27th – choice of the first round in 1983, when five quarterbacks went ahead of the Pittsburgh product, Shula preferred a run-oriented offense and conservative play-calling. That all changed when Marino showed up in Miami.

“It was amazing how everybody tried to defense Dan,” Shula recalled. “As a young quarterback, they tried to give him all kinds of looks and blitzes. But he had such a quick release, so they discovered blitzing was not the thing to do.”

His vision downfield, his release, his competitiveness, helped make Marino the most prolific passer the NFL has seen. When Marino left the Dolphins after the 1999 season, he had NFL bests of 4,967 completions, 8,358 passes, 61,361 yards and 420 touchdowns. His record of 48 TD passes in the 1984 season was broken by Peyton Manning last year.

Although he never won a Super Bowl, Marino was the 1984 league Most Valuable Player, made three All-Pro teams and nine Pro Bowls. When he retired, he owned 21 NFL marks, including most seasons with 3,000 yards or more passing (13); most yards passing in one season (5,084 in 1984 – the only year he won a conference championship); and most games with 300 yards or more passing (63).

Young began his pro career in decidedly non-Hall of Fame style. He played for the Los Angeles Express of the USFL, then the ragtag Tampa Bay Buccaneers before Bill Walsh engineered a trade to get him to the 49ers.

Young sat behind Joe Montana from 1987-90, but replaced the future Canton inductee when Montana was injured in 1991. He kept the job for most of the rest of the decade, leading the Niners to the 1994 NFL championship – their last title.

The first modern-era left-handed quarterback elected to the Hall of Fame, Young was the league’s MVP in 1992 and ‘94.

A clever runner with a strong arm and, like Marino, great field vision, Young made seven Pro Bowls and was a three-time All-Pro. He held the highest passer rating in league history (96.8) when he retired in ‘99. He also set the highest single-season rating of 112.8, which Manning broke last season.

Friedman played for four teams from 1927-34 and was one of the early NFL’s great quarterbacks. A contemporary of Red Grange, he also was a strong draw at the box office. A college star at Michigan, his popularity stayed with him when he moved to the pros.

At 5-foot-8, 170 pounds, Friedman would have been a pipsqueak in today’s game. He was an All-Star during his career, though, and Grange once called him “the best quarterback I ever played against.”

Pollard was the first black head coach in the NFL, in 1921, and was an outstanding player, too. A running back, he led the Akron Pros to the 1920 championship with an undefeated record and later organized the Chicago Brown Bombers.

Gannon retires, heads to booth

Rich Gannon officially called it quits Saturday in Napa, Calif., retiring from the Oakland Raiders after missing most of last season with a broken vertebra in his neck.

The 39-year-old quarterback announced his decision – which had been expected for months – at the team’s wine country training facility.

Gannon, the 2002 NFL MVP, already has signed with CBS Sports as an NFL game analyst after playing 18 seasons in the league. He guided the Raiders to the 2003 Super Bowl before spending much of the last two seasons injured.

Gannon threw for 28,743 yards and 180 touchdowns in his career with Minnesota, Washington, Kansas City and Oakland.

Giants, Jets brawl at practice

New York Giants tight end Jeremy Shockey got into a fight with two New York Jets players on the second play of a joint practice between the teams in Albany, N.Y., that also featured an argument between Giants coach Tom Coughlin and Jets defensive coordinator Donnie Henderson.

On the second play of a drill pitting the Giants offense against the Jets defense, Shockey got in a tussle with defensive backs Erik Coleman (formerly of Washington State University) and Oliver Celestin, and soon all three players were throwing wild punches, touching off a melee involving numerous players from both teams. Order was restored after a few minutes.

Later in the morning practice session, Coughlin got into an argument with Henderson after several plays in which the Jets appeared to go beyond the prescribed rules of the practice.

Around the league

The Ravens’ top draft pick, Mark Clayton, signed a five-year, $8.2 million contract in Baltimore, ending a five-day holdout. … The Pittsburgh Steelers’ two main running backs sat out of practice at Latrobe, Pa. Duce Staley missed all but one full day of training camp contact work because of an aching knee, and Jerome Bettis sat out , mostly just so he would have two days off in a row before a full week of camp. … Denver quarterback Jake Plummer injured a knee, but later returned to practice. Also at camp, Champ Bailey was out with a sore left hamstring.