Eric Allen entertains the fans supporting the Philadelphia Eagles, where he became a six-time Pro Bowler and one of the most feared cornerbacks of his era. (Photo by Terence Lewis/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
TEMPE – It’s a mild 70-degree day in San Diego in January. Arizona State football legend and NFL Hall of Famer Randall McDaniel is nervously traveling through the sun-bathed Southern California streets in a white Sprinter van, a crew from NFL films in tow.
He isn’t feeling the uneasy, potentially paralyzing anxiety that might have welled up before ASU’s 1987 Rose Bowl game against Michigan, but a joyous nervousness. There’s no pit in his stomach—just excited butterflies.
He’s there to visit an old friend, his college teammate and an NFL opponent, and he’s come bearing news.
McDaniel had a simple line to remember, but doubts arise as the emotion of the moment grows heavier. He rehearsed the line anyway – a futile practice.
When he finally knocked on the door and out stepped his former teammate, it was all gone. The line, the words, the plan, all of it. Instead, all he could manage was a giggle at the sight of one familiar feature he always expected from the man who answered the door.
A smile.
Eric Allen was always smiling.
“He had the biggest smile of anyone,” said Don Bocchi, ASU’s wide receivers coach on that Rose Bowl-winning team. “He would wear the smile to practice, away from practice, during practice. Some players have up days and down days. Eric Allen was always up. Eric Allen was always on.”
After McDaniel and Allen embraced, a hug laden with the unspoken bond of 40 years, McDaniel could release his overflowing sense of joy and deliver the news. Allen had been voted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame for the class of 2025.
The man who left Tempe for the NFL in 1988 and retired in 2001 could finally rest assured that his life’s work had reached its final resting place. That signature smile would be cast in bronze and memorialized in Canton, where generations can go to appreciate his impact. His smile, forged in Arizona, is immortalized there.
It was fitting that McDaniel, who played at Agua Fria High on the Valley’s west side, welcomed Allen into one of the world’s most elite fraternities. After a standout career at Point Loma High School in his hometown of San Diego, Allen’s path intertwined with McDaniel’s in the recruiting cycle of 1983 before either donned the maroon and gold.
They took their visit to ASU together. They committed together. Allen’s decision to trade in sunny San Diego for the Phoenix desert was forged in tandem with McDaniel’s more than four decades ago.
Now they’re in the Hall of Fame together.
“We showed up on a Friday,” McDaniel said about their first official ASU visit together. “We got to know each other, and we ended up going to dinner together with the coaches and then hanging out that whole evening. The two of us just hit it off. From that, that one visit, we both just said, ‘Hey, I’ll see you back here in spring, when everything kicks off.’”
Atop a horse in South Mountain Park, the future Hall of Famers began to weave a lifetime bond. For Allen, the San Diego native, horseback riding provided a brief glimpse into his new life in the Valley – a life provided by a school that he would leave an indelible mark upon.
“We took them horseback riding,” said Dave Boller, an ASU grad assistant at the time. “Half the kids from California had never been on a horse. You had to ride it out to the campfire, then you ate all this good food. And if you didn’t want to ride back, you got in the coach car, and, boom, you’re out in town.”
Arriving in the spring of 1984, Allen was an immediate impact player for the Sun Devils. He played in 11 games as a freshman, recording two interceptions. The team didn’t mirror the same promise, and after a 5-6 season under Darryl Rogers, who left to coach the Detroit Lions.
ASU hired Tulsa coach John Cooper, and his new staff included defensive coordinator Larry Marmie from Tennessee.
Dave Boller, Jim Warne Jr., Eric Allen and Greg Zumwalt pose together as former Arizona State teammates whose bond helped shape an iconic era in Sun Devil football history. (Photo courtesy of Dave Boller)
Marmie had to gain rapport with his new defense, and he wouldn’t even meet one of his biggest stars until the team left Phoenix for training camp.
Almost every year since 1960, when Frank Kush roamed the ASU sidelines, the Sun Devils have made a late-summer pilgrimage to Camp Tontozona to train at about 6,000 feet above sea level.
Approximately 90 miles northeast of Tempe, hidden among the Ponderosa pines, 17 miles from Payson within the expansive Tonto National Forest. It’s an emerald contradiction to a state known for its barren desert heat. It’s an oasis for wildlife and an escape for anyone looking to avoid the beating sun of Phoenix.
It’s also the traditional proving ground for each new year of Sun Devils.
In the summer of 1985, at a creek that runs past “Camp T,” Allen, now a sophomore, sat dangling his feet in the icy water. It offered a chilly reprieve from the strenuous training that hardened his feet during camp. Marmie found him there and sat down with his new defensive back, sparking up a conversation.
He had briefly met Eric Allen, the football player, but it was there under the cover of pine needles with the undercurrent of promising futures flowing over their feet that Marmie met Eric Allen, the man, for the first time.
“Just getting to know him,” Marmie said, “I knew he was the real thing, and yes, Eric always had that smile on his face and still does.”
In the half-decade prior, Marmie had spent time as a defensive coach at North Carolina and in Knoxville. At both stops, he had a hand in crafting the foundations of two of the most mythic and exalted defenders to ever grace a football field: Lawrence Taylor with the Tar Heels and Reggie White with the Volunteers.
Allen’s name will now be entered into the same Rolodex as Taylor and White headline as NFL Hall of Famers. However, while Marmie helped create those two vocal leaders, Allen’ let his playn speak for him.
“I remember that (Allen) was very quiet,” Marmie said. “He didn’t talk much, and he certainly wasn’t a boisterous person. But after I saw him on the practice field, and the way he went about his work, I knew that he was something special.”
Listed at 5-feet-10-inches and 184 pounds, Allen was never predestined to dominate receivers physically in college or in the NFL. He had to learn a more cerebral way to affect the game at a high level. Speed, size, and strength were all factors, but so were preparation, angles, and instincts.
“He wasn’t as big as what (the NFL would have been) looking for,” Marmie said. “But he had the skills. The position that he played, you had to have a lot of savvy, a lot of instincts, and he had all those things.
“He was way ahead of his time in terms of the intellectual part of the game, too, because he spent time in his notebook, he spent time on the film study.”
Allen’s mental acuity started to sharpen along with his team in 1985.
McDaniel, who was converted from tight end to guard shortly after arriving at ASU, joined 1986 consensus first-team All-American Danny Villa to anchor an offensive line – “the Home Boys” – made up completely of Arizona-born players.
On defense, Allen became a mainstay in the secondary, flanked by fellow future NFL draftee Anthony Parker, who had played at Tempe’s McClintock High, across the field. A 5-6 record in 1984 turned into an 8-4 in 1985. Allen doubled his interception output, and the Sun Devils held opponents to 13.6 points a game – the 15th-best mark in the country that year.
By Allen’s junior year in 1986, something special was brewing in Tempe; the team had reached its incendiary point. Allen had become one of the most respected and feared players at his position in the country. He recorded only one interception that season, as quarterbacks seldom tried his side of the field, opting for potentially more fruitful offense on the other side.
The Sun Devils torched their way through the Pac-10 and the country alike. Going undefeated through 10 games until the season finale against Arizona, they logged a 34-21 win against then-No. 6 Washington and a signature 29-20 victory over No.15 USC. They ranked in the top 10 in offensive and defensive scoring in the country that season.
Despite the 34-17 slip-up against No. 14 Arizona, losing 34-17, the blaze wasn’t going to be extinguished. The Sun Devils finished the season as Pac-10 champions, securing the right to end their season in the Rose Bowl.
Under the same Southern California sun under which Allen was raised, Arizona State had its chance at its final ascension. In its way stood the Michigan Wolverines, one of college football’s blue bloods, coached by Bo Schembechler and led by second-team All-American quarterback Jim Harbaugh.
In an age of virtually no transfers, Allen, McDaniel, and the rest of the 1984 ASU recruiting class had been together for three years. New Year’s Day 1987 would prove to be the day they left their mark forever on the program.
“A group of us all were saying, ‘This is our year, and we got the team around us,’” McDaniel said. “That summer leading up to the Rose Bowl year, we all knew we were going to do well. Right before we went to Tontozona, we all sat down and said, ‘Hey, we’re going to go do it this year. This is our year to show what we were made of.’ And then we went out and did it.”
A cagey affair ended in a 22-15 victory for ASU, which outgained the Wolverines 381 to 225 in total yards. A late-game sealing interception by Sun Devil safety Robby Boyd cemented the team’s place in history. He was perfectly positioned on the play thanks to heady advice from Allen, who wasn’t the most vocal leader but always showed up prepared.
“Robby said that Eric told him (the play),” Marmie said. “I don’t know what made Eric tell him with that certainty about what the play was going to be. He told him, ‘They’re coming right at you.’ They threw it into his arms. We picked the pass off, and that was the game. He credited Eric Allen with that one.”
The next season, the ASU secondary suffered a litany of injuries along the back line. This led to quarterbacks re-targeting Allen’s side of the field.. He recorded a career-high eight interceptions in his senior year to bring his career total to 15.
The Sun Devils struggled to a 7-4-1 record as the vaunted 1984 class’ lights dimmed. However, after Allen, McDaniel, and the others’ ended their college careers with a Freedom Bowl victory against Air Force in late 1987, the NFL journey for many of them was about to begin.
By the close of the 1988 NFL Draft, seven ASU players were selected, four of them in the first two rounds. Allen was selected with the third pick of the second round by the Philadelphia Eagles. McDaniel was drafted in the first round by the Minnesota Vikings.
“I was sitting in my friend’s apartment because they had cable TV, watching the draft at their house, waiting to get a phone call at their apartment,” McDaniel said. “We were all in different spots. So I get the call. I’m excited, and then I find out that Eric and the others all got the call that same day. We got (four) guys that went in the first two rounds off the board, that says a lot.”
Once leaving the Valley for the NFL, Allen kept building his resume over a decorated career. Allen laid waste to offensive game plans from the time he arrived in the NFL. With five interceptions in his rookie season and then eight the year after, he was an All-Pro by 1989.
In the end, Allen played 14 NFL seasons, and totaled 54 career interceptions and six Pro Bowls in an NFL tenure spanning seasons with the Eagles, Oakland Raiders, and New Orleans Saints. He had an innate knack for the end zone, scoring eight touchdowns on interception returns, which tied him for the third most in league history at the time of his retirement in 2001.
NFL players are eligible for the Hall of Fame five years after their retirement. It was 24 years later that McDaniel got a phone call from the NFL. They asked if he was alone to build suspense. He already knew the purpose of the call. They were going to ask if he was willing and able. He didn’t need the preamble. Just let him know when, and he’d be there.
On Jan. 23, McDaniel was cruising in the white Sprinter van, rehearsing his lines. It had been 40 years from that first meeting in that recruiting trip, from the first horseback ride in South Mountain, from the days of dangling their feet in the cold Camp Tontozona creek water, to the doorstep of destiny in Pasadena. McDaniel felt his purpose was to see that smile one more time.
He had his lines prepared: “Eric, welcome to the NFL Hall of Fame”. Just as when he played, he was armed with every move needed to execute the play. As soon as he saw the smile, he was disarmed.
The plan was scrapped. Joy took over.
“When I got to San Diego, I was more nervous to do that than when I played my first game,” McDaniel said. “As I was headed to the door, all I was thinking was ‘Do not faint.’ Do not stumble on the words; make sure you get that part out.”
Later that day, long after NFL Films left, McDaniel posted up in Allen’s living room, surrounded by Allen’s family. Not as one of the NFL’s greatest gladiators, not as a member of the Arizona State Ring of Honor, not even as the man tasked with alerting Eric of his enshrinement. Just as a man talking with his friend.
They spoke of Arizona State and how the desert heat molded them into the superstars they’d become. They spoke of old memories from Pro Bowls together. They spoke of life after football — a precarious subject only a few truly understand.
In retirement, Allen spent time as an ESPN NFL analyst for many years. He later was the defensive backs coach for the San Diego Fleet of the short-lived Alliance of American Football, working under Boller, the same man who once hosted him on a recruiting visit, now the team’s general manager. His football life continued as a full circle centered around ASU.
The sprinter van had offered to give McDaniel a ride back to the airport. He chose to stay. He sat with one of his oldest friends, his former teammate and professional opponent, for potentially the thousandth hour, just talking. Although many years had passed, it was as if they were still on that first recruiting visit, two football hopefuls bonding over shared dreams.
Except now those dreams were memories.
“We may not see each other for a while, but the moment we get back together, we pick up right where we left off,” McDaniel said. “We sat down out and picked up on old times, and caught up with what was going on in the others’ lives. I hung out for a couple of hours after the fact, I think I ate too many of the donut things off the counter for celebrating.”
On Aug. 2, Allen’s bronze bust will be unveiled, and he’ll give his speech. The man whose play spoke volumes throughout the Arizona desert will have to use his voice to enter the club with Marmie’s other great products.
McDaniel will be there. Of course he will, He’s been there every step of the way.
Allen is only 59 years old and has a long life still ahead of him. Even after as long as the Hall of Fame building stands in Canton, Allen will always be there. One of the greatest ever Sun Devils — his calm gaze of certainty — will always be open to spectators.
Now, Eric Allen will forever be smiling.