Alex Karras – Detroit Lions Defensive Tackle, Pro Football Hall of Famer, and One of the Most Interesting Men in NFL History
The Coin Toss
It’s 1964. Alex Karras is back on an NFL field for the first time in a year. Pete Rozelle suspended him in 1963 for gambling – six bets on NFL games, including at least one on a Lions game. He’s served his time. The referee walks over before kickoff and asks Karras to call the coin toss. Karras looks at him and says, “I’m sorry, sir. I’m not permitted to gamble.”
That line tells you more about Alex Karras than any stat sheet. He was suspended by the commissioner, came back with his dignity intact, and found the joke in it. That was the man: vicious on the field, quick off it, and impossible to embarrass.
Gary, Indiana Made Him – and His Father’s Death Pushed Him Forward
Karras was born July 15, 1935, in Gary, Indiana, then a working-class steel city south of Chicago. His father, Dr. George Karras, had immigrated from Chios, Greece, put himself through the University of Chicago, and built a medical practice in Gary. He died when Alex was thirteen. That detail doesn’t show up in most Hall of Fame write-ups, but it matters. Karras grew up in a house shaped by a man who made something out of nothing – and then that man was gone before Alex was in high school.
He had brothers who could play. Lou Karras went to the NFL with the Washington Redskins. Ted Karras played professionally too. Football was the family language. Alex learned it on parking lot asphalt near the house, and by the time he was at Emerson High School in Gary, he’d been named to the Indiana all-state team four times. He also ran track, played basketball, wrestled. But football was the one.
Iowa: The Outland Trophy, a Near-Heisman, and a Shoe Thrown at His Coach
Karras enrolled at the University of Iowa in 1955 under head coach Forest Evashevski. The relationship was bad from the start. In his sophomore year, Karras showed up to camp forty pounds overweight – someone had convinced him he needed to bulk up to survive in pro football, so he reported at 260 to 270 pounds instead of the 225 the coaching staff expected. Evashevski was on him constantly. At some point during that season, after being kept out of a game, Karras threw a shoe at his coach and quit the team.
He came back. And then he became one of the best college linemen in the country.
By 1956, Iowa went 9-1 and beat Oregon State 35-19 in the Rose Bowl. That same season, the Hawkeyes beat Notre Dame 48-8, which Karras took personally – his family had a rivalry with Notre Dame going back years, and the school was sixty miles from his childhood home. In 1957, he won the Outland Trophy as the nation’s best interior lineman and finished second in the Heisman Trophy voting, behind John David Crow of Texas A&M. No defensive tackle has ever finished higher in Heisman balloting. Not before Karras, not since.
The 1958 Draft, the Detroit Lions, and Twelve Years of the Same Number
The Detroit Lions took Karras with the tenth pick of the 1958 NFL Draft. He wore number 71 for his entire professional career, never played for another team, and between his first game and his last one missed exactly one game due to injury. That’s across twelve seasons – 161 games played, 156 starts, one missed game. The 1963 season doesn’t count; he was suspended. But from 1958 through 1970, when he was actually on the field, Karras almost never wasn’t.
He also signed a professional wrestling contract in December 1957, before the draft, earning $25,000 to wrestle during the NFL offseason. Karras was pragmatic about money in a way that many players of his era couldn’t afford not to be.
What Made Him Impossible to Block
At 6-foot-2 and 248 pounds, Karras was undersized by even 1960s standards. Interior linemen then weren’t the 320-pound road graders they became in later decades, but Karras was still working with a frame that should have made him a step slow against guards and centers with fifty pounds on him. He wasn’t slow. He was faster off the snap than almost anyone he lined up against, and he varied his pass-rush moves enough that blockers couldn’t key on one tendency.
Roger Brown, who played alongside Karras for six seasons as part of the Lions’ defensive front, formed what became known as the Fearsome Foursome with Darris McCord and Sam Williams. Double-teams freed the others. Single blocks on Karras mostly failed. The Pro Football Hall of Fame’s own accounting of his career credits him with “a variety of moves to elude opponent blockers” – which is a clinical way of saying he made offensive linemen look bad in ways that held up on film.
Historian John Turney of Pro Football Journal spent years combing available game records and credited Karras with between 100 and 110 career sacks. The NFL didn’t recognize sacks as an official statistic until 1982, twelve years after Karras retired, so none of it counted officially. He finished with 4 career interceptions, 18 fumble recoveries, and one safety. The sacks are the number that matters for historical comparison, and they’re an estimate – but it’s a careful one.
Thanksgiving 1962 and the Best Game His Defense Ever Played
The 1962 Detroit Lions finished 11-3, the best record of the Karras era. On Thanksgiving Day that year, the Lions hosted the Green Bay Packers – the dominant team in professional football at that moment, Vince Lombardi’s operation, Bart Starr under center. Detroit sacked Starr eleven times and won 26-14. It was a revenge game for an earlier 9-7 loss to Green Bay, and it remains one of the most lopsided defensive performances in Lions franchise history. Karras was first-team All-Pro that season, as he was in 1960, 1961, and 1965. Four Pro Bowl appearances: 1961, 1962, 1963, and 1966.
The Lions never won a championship during his career. He made one playoff appearance, in 1970, his final season, when Detroit went 10-4 and lost to Dallas in the divisional round. That’s the full accounting of the postseason: one game. It’s the thing that kept some Hall of Fame voters skeptical of his candidacy for decades, though it’s a strange argument against a defensive tackle – as if Karras could have tackled his way to a better offensive roster.
The Suspension: What Actually Happened in 1963
Pete Rozelle called Karras in 1963 and informed him he was suspended indefinitely for gambling on NFL games. The investigation found he had placed at least six bets on league games. Paul Hornung of the Green Bay Packers was suspended at the same time, for the same reason. Both were reinstated on March 16, 1964.
During the suspension year, Karras returned to professional wrestling. He had a high-profile angle with Dick the Bruiser – a match that generated national press attention and some real heat, because the line between performance and genuine animosity in their particular rivalry wasn’t always clear. Karras was good at it. He had the physical tools and, maybe more importantly, the performer’s instinct that would serve him well later.
The gambling charges lingered. Hall of Fame voters passed on Karras for decades after his retirement, and the 1963 suspension was almost certainly part of the reason. The College Football Hall of Fame inducted him in 1991. The Pro Football Hall of Fame waited until 2020. He died in 2012. The NFL, meanwhile, now runs DraftKings and FanDuel advertisements during every broadcast. That’s not a contradiction anyone at league headquarters seems eager to address.
After Football: Mongo, Monday Night Football, and Webster
Karras first appeared on screen while he was still a Lion – he played himself in the 1968 film adaptation of George Plimpton’s Paper Lion, the book Plimpton wrote about his time embedded with the Detroit roster. That was a natural step. Plimpton had used Karras as a central character in the book, and Karras had a comfort in front of cameras that most professional athletes don’t.
In 1974, two things happened. Mel Brooks cast Karras as Mongo in Blazing Saddles – a wordless giant who knocks out a horse with one punch and, when asked who he is, says “Mongo only pawn in game of life.” The line became a cultural touchstone. That same year, ABC brought him into the Monday Night Football booth as a color analyst alongside Howard Cosell and Frank Gifford, replacing Fred Williamson. He served three seasons, through 1976. His most-remembered moment from the broadcast chair came in his first game, when Oakland Raiders defensive lineman Otis Sistrunk was on screen. Sistrunk was bald, fierce-looking, and had no college listed in the program because he’d never attended one. Karras told the audience Sistrunk was from “the University of Mars.” Cosell loved it. The line ran for years.
In 1975, he filmed the TV movie Babe – a biopic about golfer Babe Didrikson Zaharias. His co-star was Susan Clark. They got married. In 1983, the two of them co-produced and starred in Webster, an ABC sitcom about a couple who adopts a young boy named Webster Long, played by Emmanuel Lewis. The show ran until 1989. Karras played George Papadopolis, and for a generation of viewers who had never seen him sack Bart Starr, he was simply Webster’s dad.
His other film credits include the sheriff in Porky’s (1982), a gay bodyguard in Victor/Victoria (1982) alongside Julie Andrews and James Garner, and Against All Odds (1984). He appeared in more than 35 television and film projects between 1968 and his final role on The Tom Show in 1997, when he was 62. He also wrote two books: his memoir Even Big Guys Cry in 1978 and the novel Tuesday Night Football in 1991.
His Later Years and What the NFL Did to Him
Karras developed dementia in his later years. He was among the former players who joined the concussion lawsuit against the NFL – litigation that eventually produced a settlement worth over a billion dollars, one of the largest in American sports history. He didn’t live to see the case resolved. He died on October 10, 2012, in Los Angeles, at 77, from kidney failure.
The Detroit Lions released a statement that day calling him “one of the cornerstones of our Fearsome Foursome defensive line of the 1960s and one of the greatest defensive linemen to ever play in the NFL.” Tom Lewand, then the Lions president, signed it. The Lions added Karras to their Ring of Honor in October 2018, six years after he died and two years before Canton finally came through.
The Hall of Fame: Forty-Four Years Is Too Long
Karras became Hall of Fame eligible in 1976. He was inducted in 2020 as part of the NFL’s Centennial Class – fifteen players selected to mark the league’s hundredth anniversary, most of them historical figures whose cases had been left unresolved for too long. His family accepted on his behalf.
The argument against him was never really about the football. Four First-Team All-Pro selections, eight Second-Team selections, four Pro Bowls, a member of the NFL’s All-Decade Team of the 1960s, 100 estimated career sacks before sacks were tracked, 153 consecutive starts, one missed game in twelve seasons. The College Football Hall of Fame made its call in 1991. The Michigan Sports Hall of Fame inducted him in 1980. Iowa Sports Hall of Fame, 1977. Indiana Football Hall of Fame, 1976.
The Pro Football Hall of Fame took 44 years. The gambling suspension was part of it. The lack of official sack statistics was part of it. The fact that he played most of his career on a team that didn’t win anything probably was too. None of those reasons hold up especially well under examination. A defensive tackle who started 153 consecutive games and terrorized quarterbacks for twelve seasons on a 248-pound frame doesn’t need a Super Bowl ring to justify a bronze bust in Canton. He needed voters willing to look past a one-year suspension from six decades ago.
They eventually did. He wasn’t there to see it.
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