Christensen set records while taking home titles

Published 10:55 am Thursday, November 21, 2013

Todd Christensen, a sticky-fingered, record-setting tight end for the Oakland and Los Angeles Raiders who made five Pro Bowl teams and played on two Super Bowl champion teams, died Wednesday in Murray, Utah. He was 57.

The cause was complications of liver transplant surgery, his son Toby said.

Christensen played 10 seasons for the Raiders, from 1979 to 1988 (the team moved from Oakland to Los Angeles before the 1982 season), initially as a stalwart on special teams but eventually as a favorite receiver for Raiders quarterbacks Jim Plunkett and Marc Wilson.

Christensen was not especially swift afoot, but he was strong, with good hands, and he was wily. He had a knack for outthinking defenses and finding unguarded pockets in the middle of the field.

The Raiders had a regular-season record of 90-62 during Christensen’s seasons with the team and won the Super Bowl twice, defeating the Philadelphia Eagles in 1981 and the Washington Redskins in 1984 in a game in which Christensen caught four passes.

From 1983 to 1986, Christensen was among the best tight ends in the game. Over that four-year span, he caught 349 passes, including 92 in 1983, at the time a National Football League record for the position. Three years later, he advanced his own mark, catching 95. (The current record for receptions in a season by a tight end is 110, by Jason Witten of the Dallas Cowboys in 2012.)

For his career, Christensen had 461 receptions for 5,872 yards — an average of 12.7 yards per catch — and 41 touchdowns.

Christensen, who played fullback at Brigham Young University, was drafted in the second round by the Dallas Cowboys in 1978. He broke a foot at the end of his first preseason and spent his rookie year on injured reserve. When he came back, the Cowboys tried to convert him to tight end, but he resisted. He explained in interviews that he thought he had a better chance to make the team as a fullback. He was wrong. The Cowboys waived him. So did the New York Giants. He joined the Raiders early in the 1979 season.

After his playing career, Christensen worked in television as both a college and pro football analyst, perhaps a natural second career for an athlete who liked to talk. As a player, he was always a colorful interview subject and enjoyed marshaling a wide vocabulary in the service of strident opinions and an unusually acute self-awareness.

Todd Jay Christensen was born in Bellefonte, Pa., on Aug. 3, 1956. His father, Ned, an academic with specialties in audiology and speech pathology, taught at Pennsylvania State University and later at the University of Oregon in Eugene, where Todd went to Sheldon High School.