Levon Kirkland and Greg Lloyd were the tone-setting linebackers for the Pittsburgh Steelers’ legendary defense in the 1990s. Their then-defensive coordinator, Dick LeBeau, formed their lethal defensive approach. But, standing in the Pittsburgh huddle sometimes required standing up for yourself, especially with linebacker Greg Lloyd. 

Team huddles can get heated, especially when you are playing in the defensive unit with Lloyd, who is known to be one of the most intimidating names in the NFL. However, on one occasion, Kirkland decided against backing down, and he was ready to face the consequences.

“One day, I guess I got a little brave, and he was like, ‘Don’t call the huddle so effing loud.'” Kirkland said on the Not Just Football podcast. “My temperature went up to here. I mean, the quarterback is on the center, like green 15. And I was like, ‘Hey, G’ He looked back at me, and I was like, ‘I call this huddle as effing loud as I want to.’ And he said, ‘F you.’ I’m like, ‘F you.’”

Lloyd was drafted 5 years before Kirkland. But it didn’t matter at that moment; however, when he stepped into the locker room, Kirkland did not hide the fact that he was worried about the fact that Lloyd had a third-degree black belt.

“I got in the locker room, and I was like, ‘I need to get out. I need to shower and get out of here.’ And I thought about it all night long. Like, what am I going to do? So I go to my locker, and his locker is across from mine,” Kirkland added. “He has just his towel on, and he’s walking toward me. And I grab my helmet. I’m like, ‘They’re gonna release me, they’re gonna get rid of me, but I am not gonna let this man do any kind of taekwondo on me. I’m gonna get my helmet, and I’m gonna put the logo on his face because I’m swinging, right?’ But he comes up to me, he’s like, ‘That’s what I’m talking about. You don’t let anybody intimidate you and just walk away.’ And after that, we became great friends.”

Kirkland and Lloyd played five seasons together in Pittsburgh. With both of them anchoring the defense, the Steelers had become a formidable side and even made the Super Bowl in 1995. While they were not able to win the prestigious trophy, those defensive teams from the Steelers are still remembered for how efficient they were.

This was not the only time that Kirkland had a head-to-head with Lloyd. Talking to The Washington Post as early as 1996, he narrated how he suffered a broken wrist because of Lloyd. 

“I have a broken wrist here,” Levon Kirkland told the newspaper. “And that’s from him [Lloyd]. I was a rookie [in 1992] and we were doing a little drill, and he chopped my wrist. Broke my wrist. I had a cast on it forever, like four months. That’s the hardest hit he ever delivered on me.”

The injury needed surgery and left Kirkland in a cast until February. Despite that, Lloyd never apologised to the player, staying true to his infamous “I wasn’t hired for my disposition” t-shirt mantra.

During his peak years in the NFL with the Black and Gold, Lloyd was full of rage, and his aggression turned into violence sometimes. He was described then as a ‘wild-eyed brute who hits people improperly.’ Over an 11-year career running from 1988 to 1998, Lloyd spent 10 seasons terrorizing offenses for the Steelers.

He moved to the Carolina Panthers for his final year in the NFL. He walked away from the game as a five-time Pro Bowler. He racked up 707 tackles and 54.5 sacks. These records placed him sixth on Pittsburgh’s all-time sack list. In an interview with CBS News, he laid out his simple philosophy about the game.

“Football is played between the lines, and it’s a violent game,” he said in the interview. “It’s meant to be violent. It’s supposed to be head-on collisions.”

Lloyd’s brutal style of play was well-known back in his active days. He once blindsided Brett Favre in a preseason game with a devastating hit that sent the Packers QB airborne. For this, Lloyd had to pay $12,000 in fines.

However, all of that came from the defensive system that the Steelers were playing back in the days, and Lloyd was a key part of that system.

What was the Blizburgh Defense Phenomenon?

A legendary quartet of Kevin Greene, Chad Brown, Levon Kirkland, and Greg Lloyd formed the Blitzburgh defence of the Steelers in the 1990s. The “Blitzburgh” tag was coined when radio analyst Myron Cope asked his audience to give nicknames to the quartet. Cope chose a different suggestion. However, Ed Bouchette of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette liked the name Blitzburgh. He dropped it in one of his articles and, from there, it stuck to the Steelers’ defensive line in the 1990s. 

Blitzburgh shifted to a 3-4 base alignment, which took the Steelers to a brand new level of flexibility and unpredictability. The core of the ‘Blitzburgh’ philosophy was all about illusion. It often tried to mask where the rush was coming from by launching linebackers or defensive backs into the backfield. They simultaneously dropped massive defensive linemen into pass coverage, which kept opposing offenses completely off-balance and forced costly mistakes.

“It’s a zone area where you would blitz a guy that normally doesn’t blitz and make the quarterback figure out what’s going on,” LeBeau once explained. “And if you could have enough variety of that, there aren’t enough hours in the day that a quarterback can figure all of them out.

According to LeBeau, he started working on the zone blitz during his own playing days. He was a Hall of Fame cornerback for the Detroit Lions at the time. LeBeau said that the idea sparked right there in the huddle during a game, while he was talking with his fellow Hall of Fame teammate, Dick “Night Train” Lane.