One team's spare is another team's starter. Deciding to carry a backup guard who could also placekick, the defending NFL champion Green Bay Packers traded Ed Blaine to the Eagles following the final exhibition game in 1963.

"The transition was a big bump in the road and a shock because you always think you're doing okay, but (coach Vince) Lombardi thought he needed a kicker more than he needed a third guard," said Blaine, who was entering his second season. "And so I got to Philly and actually, for me, it was a big break. The Packers were on top at the time, but the fact is I was playing behind Jerry Kramer and Fuzzy Thurston and didn't see the possibility of a starting position in the immediate future. But when I got to Philadelphia, I was immediately on the starting team."

Yes, he was starting at left guard, but on a struggling team. The Eagles posted a 2-10-2 record that season and replaced head coach Nick Skorich with Joe Kuharich.

"Coming from an organization where it was clear who was in charge and things were done in a very, very almost military kind of fashion, Nick was a lot more relaxed," Blaine said. "There wasn't somebody screaming in your face if you made a mistake. It was, 'Yeah, you made a mistake, try to do that better next time.' Clearly at that level of the game, you can't coach like that and be successful.

OG Ed Blaine

"Joe Kuharich, a lot of us thought he was going to be the salvation of the Philadelphia Eagles, even though we all were aware that he hadn't done so great in some of his previous coaching positions. But I think Joe was just a little too ... I wouldn't say lacking in discipline, but not quite tough enough. Having played under Lombardi and under Dan Devine in college, two very harsh disciplinarians, they demanded absolute everything from you and more.

"To come to coaches who weren't of that tenor was difficult for me. I wanted them to come up and kick me in the butt when I did something wrong. And when they didn't do that, I kind of took it like, well, they're not doing their job. Their job is to make sure I do my job."

Despite not having footprints on his derriere, Blaine did his job well and in 1966, his fourth season with the Eagles, was instrumental in the team enjoying its first winning campaign in five years as it finished with a 9-5 mark. However, because of his integrity, that would also be his final season in the NFL.

"I played in college at 215 pounds. I did get All-America honors, but the coaches took me aside and said, 'Ed, don't be disappointed if you don't get drafted. You're just not quite big enough.' So I wasn't expecting to be drafted," said Blaine, who was a second-round pick of the Packers. "One of my professors, my mentor as an undergraduate, didn't like athletics; but he recognized that this was something that not everyone got a chance at. He said, 'If you promise to quit after five years, I will give you a place in my laboratory that you can come back to every offseason and work on your master's degree. And then at the end of those five semesters, you'll get your degree and you have to agree to stop playing football and finish your Ph.D.

"At that time, I didn't think I would make it in the NFL, so that was the easy thing. 'Sure Doc [Clint Conaway], I agree.' And so it turns out that I did make it. I played the five years and I honored my promise. A lot of people say, 'You wouldn't quit professional football because you promised somebody you would.' And I did!"

After earning his doctorate, Blaine became and remains a professor of medical pharmacology and physiology at the University of Missouri. And following 12 years as its director, he is also a research investigator at the Dalton Cardiovascular Research Center. He has orchestrated programs to discover new blood pressure-lowering drugs and has led research teams that made major contributions to the discovery and description of a hormone that is secreted by the heart and plays a significant role in blood pressure and salt and water regulation. Blaine has published more than 100 scientific literature articles and holds four patents.

"My great passion in life is discovery. I guess I've always been this way. There's nothing that excites me more than finding out something that nobody knows. All the stuff that's out there that we do know, there is this opportunity to discover stuff that you don't know," said Blaine, who makes his home in Columbia, MO, and has two adult children and two grandsons. "In my particular world, medical research, at least I can say mine has relevance to the human health and medicine.

"I love being in the laboratory. I like being in the middle of this thing that we call discovery. The new ideas. I love to read scientific literature, about other people discovering new things and trying to integrate their discoveries into my thinking. This has always been the thing that I ultimately wanted to do and it just worked out well for me.

"I'm a very, very fortunate person because I got the best of both worlds. I did have another beacon in my life and it really has turned out to be fulfilling. I am just pleased as I can be that I made the decision back in 1966 to cut my (football) career short and to come back. I think if I had stayed for 10 years, I'm not sure I'd have done it. I might have gotten too far away and it would have been very hard to backtrack."