The Rams had only one winning season from 1963 to 1966, the span in which all four Fearsome players were teammates, but those linemen were celebrated for their strength, flair, know-how and agility.

Olsen, 6 feet 5 inches and 270 pounds or so, played left tackle, jamming up the middle, stopping draw plays and screen passes and often pressuring the quarterback. Deacon Jones, another eventual Hall of Famer, extremely quick and adept at the head slap, lined up at left end. Jones joined with Lamar Lundy, the right end, in rolling up the sacks while Roosevelt Grier, the former Giants star, was a formidable presence at right tackle.

“Merlin had superhuman strength,” Jones told The Los Angeles Times in 1985. “If I was beating my man inside, he’d hold him up and free me to make the tackle. If he had to make an adjustment to sacrifice his life and limb, he would make it. A lot of the plays I made were because he or the others would make the sacrifice.”

Olsen felt that the Fearsome Foursome could have excelled in any era.

“What made the Foursome unique, I think, is that we could have fit in extremely comfortably in the modern game,” he told The Orange County Register in 1997. He estimated that the line’s average weight was 275 pounds and said that “there was not a weight lifter in the group.”

“Imagine how big we’d be today,” he added.

“We could all run,” Olsen said. “The other thing we had going for us was a rare chemistry. There was also a very special kind of unselfishness.”