Man, I remember when we drafted him out of Washington...Liked him a lot as a player too - fans back then were having to adjust to that great PPE DL hanging up the cleats

68 is way too young to meet your maker

RIP

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Former Vikings defensive end Doug Martin dead at 68

The Vikings selected Doug Martin with the No. 9 pick in the 1980 NFL draft, and the 1982 first-team All-Pro recorded 61½ sacks over his decade with the team. He died this week.

Doug Martin, a defensive end who played 10 seasons for the Vikings after they made him the No. 9 pick in the 1980 NFL draft, died at age 68.

The Vikings announced his death Thursday, April 23, reporting that Martin had died three days earlier.

“He was a huge part of any success we had, and you could count on him,” Scott Studwell, the former Vikings linebacker who was teammates with Martin for Martin’s entire NFL career, told the team’s website. “He was a great player and a better man. We will miss him.”

After he was named a second-team All-American as a senior at Washington in 1979, the Vikings made him the highest drafted Huskies player in 28 years the following April with the first of their 12 picks that year.

Martin’s NFL career began at Met Stadium playing for Bud Grant and ended at the Metrodome under Jerry Burns. Over his 126 games, including 94 starts, from 1980 to ’89, he had 61½ sacks, seven forced fumbles, seven fumble recoveries and an interception. His sack total is ninth in franchise history.

He was selected as a first-team All-Pro for the strike-shortened 1982 season, when he led the league with 11½ sacks in only nine games. That was the first season sacks were an official NFL statistic. In 1983, Martin again led the Vikings with 13 sacks, and in 1986 and ’87 he was second on the team with nine sacks each year.

His honors also included being named as NFC defensive player of the month in September 1986, after he had 14 tackles, three sacks, two forced fumbles and one recovered fumble in four games.

“You don’t see the grubby things he’s done,” then-Vikings defensive coordinator Floyd Peters said at the time. “He fights down the line to keep the guy off our linebacker. All you see are the flashy things. If you look at the films, you’d say he played his butt off.”

Martin was a native of Fairfield, Calif., and the younger brother of George Martin, another defensive end who played 201 games with the New York Giants from 1975 to 1988.

In college, Doug Martin accumulated 323 tackles from 1976 to ’79 at Washington, helping the Huskies beat Michigan 27-20 in the 1978 Rose Bowl in his sophomore season. That Huskies team was quarterbacked by Warren Moon, a future Hall of Famer who played for the Vikings from 1994 to ’96.

“I’ll always remember his big chuckle, his laugh, and I will miss him calling me ‘Moony,’ ” Moon told the Vikings’ website. “He was a loyal and honest friend.”

According to the Seattle Times, after retirement Doug and wife Audrey returned to the Seattle area, where Doug opened up two restaurants. Audrey and Doug met in high school in 1972 and married nine years later.

“He did a lot of things low-key,” Audrey Martin told the Times. “And I’m finding he did a lot of special things for people without acknowledgment. He never wanted to seek the spotlight, but just wanted to do good.

“He was a good man at a time where good men are fewer in number.”

STRIB