Brownstown Central guard Creed Gambrel’s origin story in becoming a football offensive lineman might well be the paradigm of all of the big-boy blockers in the game.
“I was bigger than most other kids, and I wasn’t very fast,” said the 6-foot-2, 250-pound junior guard for the Braves.
Size is a common characteristic of offensive linemen, the human bulldozers who may not literally be earth movers but move similarly sized players out of the way so the smaller, faster guys on their team can run to daylight.
[sc:text-divider text-divider-title=”Story continues below gallery” ]
Brownstown Central, 1-0 entering a Friday night home game against Eastern (Pekin), features what used to be commonly called smash-mouth football. The Braves run the ball as creatively, as powerfully, as swiftly as they can and consider it their signature.
Coach Reed May needs young men who can carve holes in the defensive line if the Braves are going to win. It’s not as if Brownstown cannot throw the ball, but it plays more of an old-fashioned style with the emphasis more on the ground game than the air game.
The least amount of glory accrues to offensive linemen. They do the grunt work, but the ball carriers score the points. Yet they do enjoy what they do, even if the pleasures do not provide fans instant replays.
“You get to hit someone instead of letting them hit you,” said junior tackle Kahne Bell, sounding a little bit like General Patton and his tanks.
Brownstown’s starting offensive line consists of Bell, Treyton Ream, Brayden Millick, Gambrel and Dustyn Kocsis.
They may be unheralded compared to players at flashier positions, but they make the operation go. Typically, they are strong young men who excel in the weight room and are not shy about advertising how much they can lift in different disciplines, even having shirts printed up announcing those personal bests.
The strength is employed to shove opponents out of the way. In Brownstown’s opener against Charlestown, the Braves rushed for about 400 yards. That is controlling the line of scrimmage, and the ripple effect is that it controls the clock without the other team getting the ball often.
Although Gambrel mentioned not being fast, he meant in an open-field kind of way like a track race. Successful offensive linemen have quick enough feet to react quickly when the ball is hiked to plow into a rushing defensive lineman.
“When I walk up to the line for a running play, my head is on, ‘I’m going to fire off the ball,’” said Millick, a 6-foot, 215-pound center.
Bell, a 6-2, 235-pound junior, said his mind is on nothing but the play called in the huddle. Hitting, the fundamental nature of football, is what turns on the linemen.
“It feels great when you have the first contact,” Bell said. “It’s something else if you beat the dudes.”
Along with Ream, 6-1, 290, and Kocsis, 6-0, 265, the Brownstown line is larger than average members of the student body. But they had to grow into their measurements. That means upperclassmen may have picked on them at one time on the line of scrimmage or even older, bigger brothers at home.
Most of these players lived through that kind of experience.
“It made me tough,” Bell said. “I can take a hit. If you don’t fire out, you’re going to get hit.”
They say they would not take it easy on brothers or up-and-coming linemen, either.
“I got to teach him to be tough,” Millick said of a younger sibling.
Since they only ever show up on the score sheet by accident, offensive linemen — at all levels of football — realize fans whose eyes follow the ball, as it is nestled into a runner’s belly or it is floating through the air on a pass or kick, don’t watch their work.
Or even understand it, except in theory. The job assigned to the offensive line and what goes on up close on the line of scrimmage remains somewhat of a mystery.
“If they don’t know about football,” Millick said, “they don’t get it.”