Refining a Noble cause

It takes a special kind of guy to play nose tackle.

Not a pretty guy, or a fancy guy, or a particularly athletic guy. Not a guy in search of big money, babes or ESPN face time.

It takes a guy like the Washington Redskins’ Brandon Noble. A squatty, beefy guy. A guy who proudly rubs his tummy and probably eats all the dinner rolls while waiting for the entree. A guy with a Bigfoot beard, a hankering for hunting and no illusions about his identity.

“I’m a football player,” Noble said yesterday. “There are people who are great athletes, like LaVar [Arrington], who play football. And then there are football players. And that’s what I am. I love to play the game. I love to go get dirty. I think it should be played outside, in the grass, in the mud.”

The nose tackle, you see, is a man meant to be beaten down. He lines up over the center, gets double-teamed on most plays and gets sacks pretty much by accident.

But he performs a key role. By covering the center on every play, the nose tackle frees the middle linebacker to attack the ballcarrier, rather than fight off a blocker on the move.

“He’s a key part of the defense, especially from my position,” middle linebacker Jeremiah Trotter said. “When you can hold that center up a split-second, it gives me time to make the read and then get downhill.”

Noble’s blue-collar role is why one could never make a direct comparison to defensive tackle Daryl Gardener, the Redskins’ 2002 star who wasn’t re-signed and was replaced on free agency’s first day by Noble.

Technically, Noble took Gardener’s place. But while Gardener was asked to penetrate into the backfield and disrupt plays, Noble is meant to hold his ground and several blockers, making sure Trotter can shine.

“You ever heard that saying, ’Too many chiefs and not enough Indians?’” Trotter said. “You need some guys to do the dirty work. They brought Brandon in just for that. They brought him in to keep the linemen off me. I was very excited about that.”

A hot topic has been whether the Redskins’ defensive line can perform without Gardener and defensive tackle Dan Wilkinson, the latter released last week because he refused to take a pay cut. It’s easy to predict a big drop-off for the No.5-ranked defense with no in-their-prime stars on the line.

Noble calls such talk “understandable” but remains confident that he and Jermaine Haley can, if not match the level of Gardener and Wilkinson, be just as valuable.

“I think we’re going to be OK,” Noble said. “Now we don’t have the name recognition, and I’m not going to tell you that Jermaine and I are going to get 15 sacks between the two of us. But we’ll be a solid group. We’ll let the linebackers run. And we’ll be stout in the middle.”

The first preliminary test comes Saturday at Carolina, where Washington will face former Redskins running back Stephen Davis, one of the NFL’s most powerful interior rushers.

Noble knows Davis well after battling him twice a season the past four years as a Dallas Cowboy. During that span Noble faced similar questions when he and Michael Myers replaced Chad Hennings and Leon Lett during the 2000 season.

“We actually had a better run defense than we did with some of the bigger names in there,” Noble said. “If you don’t get those headlines and people don’t recognize your name, then they assume you’re not a good football player. That’s not always the case.”

People also tend to make assumptions based on size. That drove Marvin Lewis crazy last year when he was Redskins coordinator, because everyone assumed he needed two big defensive tackles — reprising his Baltimore Ravens setup in 2000 — to have a successful defense.

Noble, whose 304 pounds are well short of the 330-360 widebody range, laughed as he described watching film of hefty defensive tackles, calling their technique often “horrible.”

“Smaller guys can do the same things,” Noble said. “We just need to be better technicians.”

And he is, as far as Redskins defensive end Renaldo Wynn is concerned.

“I don’t know anyone who plays the nose, as far as technique-wise, better than he does,” Wynn said.

Washington also expects to benefit from depth, rotating its linemen in waves rather than keeping a few stars on the field constantly. (Think 2000, when Bruce Smith, Dana Stubblefield, Marco Coleman and Wilkinson refused to come off the field.)

Will it work? It’s far too early to tell. Regardless, don’t expect too many highlights of Bigfoot in burgundy. He’ll be mucking away on the interior, clogging holes, opening up plays for his teammates and looking for little more than “camaraderie.”

“I always joke with my wife, I say I probably would have joined the military if I didn’t play football,” Noble said. “It’s that same kind of hanging out with the guys, the camaraderie, knowing that the guys next to me and around me appreciate what I do.

“As opposed to everybody outside. Because when you’re winning football games, there’s enough credit to go around. You don’t have to worry about that.”