His "Real Men Are Black" T-shirt has stirred controversy in the past, but Lloyd couldn't care less.

"When you play football for 60 minutes the way I do, you don't have to answer to anybody," Lloyd has said of himself.

The NFL, however, has repeatedly fined him for hitting quarterbacks too vigorously. The league charged him $12,000 after an exhibition game last summer for trying to dismember Green Bay's Brett Favre.

"[NFL executives] are a bunch of paper-pushing . . . who sit back there and make those rules," Lloyd was quoted as saying two years ago after earning a $1,500 fine for throwing a football into the stands. "They've never played a game in their life. I would like for some of them to come down on that field for just one day, we'll suit up so we can knock the . . . out of them."

It is the Lloyd way, the mean way. Smell the blood, or laugh, as he did in 1989, watching Al Toon's eyes roll back into his head after Lloyd had knocked him into a concussion.

"People come to watch somebody get knocked out," said Lloyd, who was ejected from his first pro game for punching Denver quarterback Gary Kubiak. "That's what people come to see. Nobody is out there to protect us, but you go after a quarterback and everybody screams.

"The game is set up for the quarterback. The quarterback can play forever in this league because of the rules. They might as well put them in a glass case back there and put in a chute that they can throw out of."

Oh, how it galls Lloyd to go easy on quarterbacks. This is a man who once head-butted a teammate and then needed stitches to close a gash on his head. His teammate was fine, because he was wearing a helmet. Lloyd wasn't. This is the football player who promised to knock Miami quarterback Dan Marino "into tomorrow" before knocking him out of the game, although he said later he was misquoted.

"Whoever you have on the other side of the ball, I guess as a key player, to get Emmitt Smith or to get Troy Aikman out of the game is definitely going to help the Pittsburgh Steelers. Not that you go out there with that intention to hurt, but to get him out of the game.

"When you go back there and hit the quarterback, he gets a concussion and comes out of the game, that's the risk you take sitting back there. That's part of that joy, beating that tackle and getting back there. Now understand, they're just not going to let you run back there and tackle him. You get to him, and you can tackle him and take him out of the game. That's just part of the game. That's the same thing as getting chop-blocked. If the ref doesn't call it, a player has to deal with that. America has to deal with that."

This is the world according to Greg Lloyd: The end justifies the mayhem.

"If I have to scream, if I have to bite, spit, get a 15-yard penalty, curse somebody out, even if I have to curse out one of my coaches and it means winning, then that's the ultimate thing. If you don't like it, the hell with you."