Steve Zabel

Steven Gregory Zabel arrived in the National Football League as a tight end and left it as a linebacker, and he was, before any of that, the last two-way player the University of Oklahoma ever fielded. He spent a decade proving that the line between competitor and troublemaker was thinner than the game liked to pretend. Zabel died on June 23, 2026, at the age of 78. A cause of death was not disclosed. His death was reported by national and Oklahoma news outlets, including NBC Sports, and his arrangements are being handled by Smith and Kernke Funeral Homes in the Oklahoma City area.

He was born on March 20, 1948, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and raised in Thornton, Colorado, where his gifts were too broad to confine to one sport. At Thornton High School he lettered nine times across football, basketball, and track, and won a state championship in the high jump, an all-around record that hinted at the positionless career to come.

At Oklahoma, Zabel did nearly everything a football field allowed: tight end, linebacker, and punting, the program's final two-way player in an era when the rest of the sport was already splitting into offensive and defensive specialists. A two-way player had to master both the choreography of catching passes and the open-field violence of stopping a runner, and the breed was vanishing because few could do both at the highest level. Zabel could. He was a Second-team All-American in 1968 and a two-time First-team All-Big Eight selection in 1968 and 1969, and Oklahoma inducted him into the state's Sports Hall of Fame in 2015.

The Philadelphia Eagles took him sixth overall in the first round of the 1970 NFL Draft and put him at tight end. The fit did not last. "As a rookie tight end, I'd gotten kicked out of three games for fighting," he later recalled. "And at the end of the year, they told me they didn't think I had the proper temperament to be successful on offense and wanted to move me to outside linebacker. I jumped at the opportunity." The temperament that disqualified him as a pass catcher made him a natural on defense.

So, for five seasons, did Zabel. His exit from Philadelphia had the same blunt edge as his arrival. A contract dispute with Eagles head coach Mike McCormack settled the matter. "I was asking for a contract for $75,000," Zabel said, "and I got up and said, 'You know what, Coach? I wouldn't play for you for $100,000.' I walked out the door and stuck my head back in and said, 'Well, maybe for $100,000, I would.'" The Eagles traded him to the New England Patriots in 1975.

In New England he played four seasons and earned a place on the franchise's all-decade team for the 1970s, then closed his career with the Baltimore Colts in 1979. Across ten years he appeared in 124 games and started 95, intercepting six passes and recovering 13 fumbles: 60 games as an Eagle, 49 as a Patriot, 15 as a Colt.

He was also a labor man at a combustible moment for the sport. As a Patriot, Zabel organized for the players' association, and in 1975 he and his teammates refused to play, forcing the cancellation of a preseason game, an act of leverage in the long fight over players' rights that would reshape the NFL.

The work that outlasted the football came later. In the early 1990s Zabel and his college teammate Larry Bross co-founded City Care, an Oklahoma City nonprofit that feeds the homeless and mentors children.

Zabel, who made his later home in the Oklahoma City area, is survived by his wife and three children, who are not named in the available reports. A memorial service is set for 10:00 a.m. on Tuesday, July 7, 2026, at the Life.church Edmond campus in Oklahoma. The funeral home's notice lists June 24; the date corroborated by news coverage is June 23.