Joe Schmidt, the Detroit Lions Hall of Famer who played a pioneering role in the emergence of pro football’s glamorous middle linebacker spot while starring on two league championship teams in the 1950s, died on Wednesday in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla. He was 92.
His daughter Kerry Schmidt confirmed his death.
Schmidt, who played for 13 seasons with the Lions and later served as their head coach, was renowned for anticipating the opposing team’s next play, chasing down running backs, defending against passes and tackling with hard-hitting gusto.
And as the defensive signal-caller, he reflected a tidal shift in pro football.
Schmidt became a key figure on the Lions’ defense when they were among the N.F.L. teams adopting a new defensive scheme to counter the growing emphasis on the passing game. The team used four down linemen, three linebackers and four defensive backs in place of the customary five or six linemen up front and no more than two linebackers.
“Little by little, the offense dictated changes on defense,” Schmidt told The New York Times in 2001, recalling that when he arrived in the N.F.L., “the middle was open.”
“No one was there to stop the pass over the middle,” he said.
“The hardest part was learning to play a position that had not existed,” he added. “There was no position coach. They just tell you what to do and determine how to get it done. How to handle blockers, how to flow with the play, all those things you had to pick up on your own.”
Schmidt was named to 10 Pro Bowls, selected as a first-team All-Pro eight times and chosen for the N.F.L.’s all-decade team for the 1950s.
The Lions were an N.F.L. powerhouse in those years. They defeated the Cleveland Browns for the 1952 league championship; beat them again in the 1953 title matchup, when Schmidt was a rookie; and bested them once more in 1957, routing them 59-14. They also went to the championship game against the Browns in 1954, but that time they lost.
Schmidt was 6 feet 1 inches and 220 pounds, not especially big even by the standards of his era. But he anchored the defense on Lions teams that included his fellow future Hall of Famers Yale Lary, Jack Christiansen and Dick Lane (known as Night Train) in the secondary, along with an offense featuring Bobby Layne at quarterback, Doak Walker at halfback and Lou Creekmur and Dick Stanfel on the line.
He was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio, in 1973.
Schmidt attracted national attention for his doggedness. “It’s maneuverability that counts here, and Joe has it — the fastest reactions, probably, of any linebacker in the business,” the sportswriter Myron Cope wrote in The Saturday Evening Post in 1958.
Schmidt wasn’t the first person in the N.F.L. to play middle linebacker, a position that developed gradually in the 1950s. But the Hall of Fame cited him as “the first to play the position with such finesse that even the masses in the stands could see the growing value of the ‘defensive quarterback.’”
The rise of the middle linebacker as a celebrated figure was underlined in 1960 by “The Violent World of Sam Huff,” the CBS documentary, narrated by Walter Cronkite, about the fearsome leader of the Giants’ vaunted defense.
Joseph Paul Schmidt was born in Pittsburgh on Jan. 19, 1932, the youngest of four brothers. His father, Peter, a self-taught architect and builder, died when Joe was 12. His mother, Stella (Bender) Schmidt, raised Joe as a single mother and cleaned office buildings to support the family.
At age 14, Joe played semipro football alongside adults on a team coached by his brother John, who was 15 years older. John had played center for the Carnegie Tech team that appeared in the 1939 Sugar Bowl and briefly for the Pittsburgh Steelers. Joe played high school football, then became a linebacker and center at the University of Pittsburgh. He was named an All-American by the International News Service in 1952.
But injuries he had incurred, and fears that he might have a hard time coping with much larger offensive guards, kept him from being a high pick in the 1953 N.F.L. draft. The Lions took him in the seventh round.
Schmidt’s teammates voted him their most valuable player four times. He was also the Lions’ longtime captain. When he retired after the 1965 season, he had intercepted 24 passes and recovered 14 fumbles.
Schmidt coached the Lions from 1967 to 1972, when they compiled a 43-34-7 record. They finished in second place in their division in each of his last four seasons, making the playoffs in 1970 but losing to the Dallas Cowboys in the first round.
He met Marilynn Rotz on a blind date in the late 1950s, arranged by a teammate. They married in 1959.
After leaving football, Schmidt lived in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., a Detroit suburb, and ran his own business as a manufacturers’ representative selling rubber and plastic parts to the major American auto companies. He and his wife moved to Palm Beach Gardens several years ago.
In addition to his daughter Kerry, he is survived by his wife; another daughter, Amy Schmidt; and three sons, Bill, Mark and Joe Jr.
George Plimpton, who worked out with the Lions at their 1963 training camp for his inside-the-locker-room book, “Paper Lion” (1965), wrote of the wry view Schmidt took of his reputation for toughness complementing his athleticism.
Schmidt, he wrote “had a size 18 neck,” but he noted that “its length was inconsiderable: His head seemed set immediately on his shoulders, like a stone Aztec head on a wall.”
“Schmidt himself joked about it,” Plimpton noted. “He said he had been 6 feet 3 inches when he came to the Lions, with a fine neck, not swanlike but evident enough, and during his playing years of diving and bulling his way through blockers his head had been driven down a few inches into his body, like a cartoon character bopped with a sledgehammer.”
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