East Northport's Greg Buttle recalls Jets picking him in 1976 NFL Draft

Greg Buttle wanted nothing to do with the Jets. They were a sorry team that hadn’t had a winning record in six seasons. He wanted to play for Pittsburgh after his time starring at nearby Penn State; he saw himself lining up next to Jack Ham and being part of the Steel Curtain defense. And he couldn’t stand Joe Namath, still the quarterback of the Jets, for what he had done in Super Bowl III to Buttle’s favorite team growing up.

“I was in eighth grade when the Colts got beat by the Jets and I cried,” Buttle told Newsday. “I hated the guy in the white shoes.”

That was 50 years ago this spring.

These days the former linebacker, current radio analyst, diverse entrepreneur and resident of Long Island — having moved here when the Jets were based at Hofstra — can hardly imagine his life without having been selected by the Jets in the third round of that 1976 draft.

“It’s been a really nice ride that I never expected here in the New York area,” the 71-year-old said from his home in East Northport recently. “I look back on that and say, ‘Gee, everything I have done outside of football has been located here on Long Island.’ ”

That includes a number of businesses over the years, ranging from restaurants and nightclubs to fitness centers to predictive analytics. It includes raising a family with his wife, Rita, who grew up here. Heck, he even became good friends with his former nemesis.

“I found out he wasn’t the Joe Namath I thought he was,” Buttle said with a laugh. “Funny stuff.”

And of course it included an admirable playing career. Buttle played nine seasons, all with the Jets, and went to the playoffs twice.

While tackles and sacks were murky statistical categories at the time, the versatile defender did have 15 interceptions and scored three defensive touchdowns. In 2019, to celebrate the NFL’s 100th season, the Jets selected 26 players for their all-time team. Buttle was on the list.

“I ended up going to the Jets and getting the greatest coach I ever had in terms of how to play the game of professional football,” he said of his first defensive coordinator, who soon would become his head coach. “I look back on everything and I have to point to Walt Michaels as the number one reason for my success.”

His biggest takeaway as this milestone anniversary approaches?

“Fifty years. It’s amazing,” Buttle said. “Time flies. My dad told me it would, but I didn’t believe him.”

None of that was on his mind on April 8, 1976, though, when he learned that he’d been drafted . . . and by whom.

Long Island is home

That news came to him as he and several other draft-eligible players assembled in the Manhattan office of his former agent while the selection process took place at the Roosevelt Hotel on East 45th Street. Buttle could have walked over to hear his name announced if he even knew that the draft was taking place in the same town.

Back then, NFL drafts were more about paperwork than potential and pizzazz, a slow-moving 17 rounds of tedium that barely created a ripple of notice, even for those intimately involved.

“I didn’t even know it was in a hotel,” Buttle recalled. “After the draft, I went home. That was it. No big fanfare. No nothing. Case closed.”

Being taken by the team that trained in Hempstead and played its games in Flushing meant little to him. The Jets might as well have been from Saturn.

“I knew nothing about Long Island,” Buttle said.

Once he settled in — first at Point Lookout and then in Jericho for a time — he started to learn. He started to appreciate it. The former Jersey Shore lifeguard started to feel at home.

“I found out quickly once I got to the Jets that Long Island was a lot like Absecon Island that has Atlantic City, Ventnor, Margate and Longport on it,” he said of where he grew up as the son of an FBI agent. “Long Island felt like a barrier island, especially when you were down on the South Shore. Same type of beaches as the Jersey coast. It was kind of the same thing when I got used to it.”

One thing he never got used to?

“The traffic never ends,” he said. “From the day I got here to this day, the traffic is atrocious.”

The Jets have been similarly consistent in that regard. They have never returned to the Super Bowl after beating Buttle’s beloved Colts and have played for the conference title four times in the half-century since his arrival. They are in a 15-year playoff drought, the longest in the four major pro sports leagues in North America.

The 1976 draft was their first real post-Super Bowl attempt to change all of that.

Todd replaces Namath

There still were several players from the 1968 team on the roster that year — Namath, Winston Hill, Emerson Boozer and Randy Rasmussen among them — but it was clear the Jets were about to move on from that sacred team. They took Alabama quarterback Richard Todd with the sixth overall pick, expecting him to replace Namath at some point.

“I was hoping they’d let him be my tutor for two, three, four years,” Todd, who unlike Buttle had grown up idolizing Namath, told NYJets.com in 2019. “It just didn’t work out like that.”

About halfway through the season, Namath was sidelined by injury and Todd made his first start. Todd went 2-4 as a starter before Namath returned and made his final start for the Jets on Dec. 12, 1976, in a 42-3 loss to the Bengals at Shea Stadium. Namath threw four interceptions in the game, the Jets finished the season with a 3-11 record and Namath was waived before the start of the 1977 season. Todd took over from there.

“Richard Todd was one of the toughest quarterbacks I have ever been around,” Buttle said. “I’ve never seen a guy get injured and still play like he did. Kenny O’Brien was like Gumby when he was out on the field with us, he never got hurt, but Todd took slings and arrows . . . He was a good quarterback, especially for one coming out of Alabama where they didn’t throw the ball much, but he could run it, he was tough and he could take a hit.”

Todd played eight seasons for the Jets, and while he still ranks among the most proficient passers in franchise history and in 1981 gave the Jets their first playoff appearance since 1969, he is remembered most for throwing five interceptions in the AFC Championship Game against the Dolphins at the end of the strike-shortened 1982 season. Miami won on a mud-soaked field at the Orange Bowl, 14-0.

“I think about that game all the time,” Todd said in the interview with the team’s website. “I threw five interceptions. If they could have caught the ball, they could have had 10.”

He also pointed out that Dolphins quarterback David Woodley threw three interceptions himself in that game.

“If we could have caught the ball, we could have had six,” Todd said. “I don’t know, you go back and forth and think about the game plan, it was just a muddy field. I don’t think we did enough to get them off their defensive plan. It was kind of a bad day for offense that day.”

Page-turning draft class

Todd was the only quarterback selected in the entire first round of that 1976 draft, but there were plenty of other key selections made by the Jets that year.

They drafted Shafer Suggs in the second round, a defensive back who became a safety for them. Buttle went in the third round. In the seventh round, they selected a defensive lineman from Kent State who soon would change his name to Abdul Salaam, the first piece of the Sack Exchange front to arrive in New York.

In the 11th round, they took defensive lineman Lawrence Pillers, who wound up having a longer and more successful career than any of the Jets’ other picks in that draft. He was traded to the 49ers in 1980 and won two Super Bowls with them as part of a 10-year career.

“The drafting of those guys, just like anything else, you don’t know what you are in the midst of until after it happens and you can look back on things,” Buttle said of what turned out to be a page-turning draft class for the Jets.

The 1976 draft was memorable in other ways, too. It was the first expansion draft after the 1970 merger between the NFL and AFL, with the Seahawks and Buccaneers added to the league. And it was the first draft moved to April rather than taking place shortly after the Super Bowl in January or early February, as had been the tradition.

For Buttle, though, the biggest change was that it brought him to Long Island, the place he didn’t want to come to that he’s now called home for most of his life.

He’ll be breaking down this year’s draft to see whom the Jets should select, including with their two first-round picks, in what could be yet another page-turning process for the team. He said he laughs a little when all the “experts” suggest whom the Jets should take.

“If everybody was an expert, then every player who was selected would be the greatest player of all time, but that’s not the way it works,” he said. “You have to deep-dive into the players and see how they see the game and understand what type of person that guy is . . . A lot of them are just full of talent but not full of expertise. If you can’t get the expertise in the kid, well, you wasted a draft choice on him.”

That’s one of the few things about the draft that haven’t changed in 50 years.

Buttle once was one of those prospects no one knew about for sure, too. He turned out to be a pretty good one.

So while he soaks in the spectacle that the NFL Draft has become, a three-day star-studded television road show that this year somewhat ironically will be held in the city where he once hoped to wind up — Pittsburgh — he’ll be reflecting on his own journey a bit.

“It didn’t work out,” he said of all he thought he wanted and didn’t want 50 years ago. “I think, fortunately, it didn’t work out like that at all.”

By Tom Rock

tom.rock@newsday.com@TomRock_Newsday

Tom Rock began covering sports for Newsday in 1996 and became its NFL columnist in 2022. He previously was Newsday's Giants beat writer beginning in 2008.