Best player I ever saw in football

I love soccer but dick Butkus was the best American football player I ever saw

Best defender I ever saw an animal loved that guy

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ou5Nn9FEaiw

Foot,


great player, TERRIBLE name.

The best I ever seen in person:

High School: Joe McKnight. McKnight and John Curtis Christian came to play Hoover High (suburb of Birmingham) in I think McKnight's senior year. He flat out torched Hoover (who was ranked #1 by USA Today at the time) for 70 yards rushing and 2 big TD's receiving (134 yards receiving) and they won 28-14.

College: Either Peyton Manning or Julio Jones.

Never been to a pro game so I have no opinion there.

The most out-of-scale player I ever saw in person was Tony Dorsett at Pitt. When he turned the corner, it was like he disappeared and then reappeared 15 yards downfield.

I really want to say that Joe Greene is the best player I ever saw, but then I think of Barry Sanders. Some of the stuff he did just didn't seem human.

Edit: I should add that Jim Brown is just beyond my memory.

Gale Sayers

Jim Brown

Gale Sayers and dick Butkus were rookies together on the bears.

Butkus was an animal even in college. Sayers was not as well known before he went to the bears.

Butkus was the greatest defensive player I have ever scene. I was a Ray Nitchee fan but Butkus was better.

Jim Brown was something but brown had a great offensive line and he had a great blocking fullback on his team.

One of the best college linebackers I have seen on the blitz was Brian Bosworth. But he could not do that in the NFL.

Jim Brown gets my vote. He had speed, strength and dancer-like moves.

#34 Sweetness, Walter Payton.

Hands down the best I ever saw.

In person - Marshawn Lynch. Saw him score his first touchdown as a Seahawk in Chicago, just after he was traded from Buffalo. Beast Mode is no hype - he was a BEAST!

jim brown hands down, and he did not have spectacular blocking, he did most of his great runs on his own relying on his strength and speed, one of the hardest running backs to take down in history of football.

Jim Brown running was unique he gave the defender a leg then pulled it out of his hands. Jim Brown was not a fast back his longest run was a little over 50 yards. He was remarkably injury free for years. I think a player got his fingers in his eyes so he missed some games befecause of it. He retired fairly young he only played 12 years.

Oh best thing about him was he is a trump supporter

The Browns had a very good offensive line. What they did not have was a great defense.

Lawrence Taylor is by far the best player I've ever seen.

Yes Lawrence Taylor was great on the blitz. But the guy I liked to watch against the run was the other outside guy Carl Banks. Game plan of opponent was run from Lawrence Taylor right at Carl banks. That did not work to well.

Then they had Carson and reasons in the middle with the nose guard jamming that up. So what was left was to try and pass. So it was three and out for the opponents.

Then Giants get the ball and hold it for 8 to ten minutes a quarter.

The Bears had the third, fourth and sixth picks in the FIRST ROUND of the 1965 draft. Their first round picks were Butkus, Sayers and Steve DeLong. DeLong signed with an AFL team instead and had a distinguished seven year career that actually ended with him as a Bear. The Bears also drafted Dick Gordon that same year late in the draft and he would have been a nice NFL receiver if only they could have developed a quarterback.

Butkus and Nitschke are both from the Chicago area, Butkus from the city and Nitschke from my hometown, Elmwood Park. Both played college ball at Illinois just a few years apart. And they are, arguably, two of the BEST linebackers in the history of the game.

Butkus wore number 50 in college. Number 51 was assigned to Bruce Capel, the starting center and Butkus's roommate when they travelled to away games. You'll find a photograph in google images (from the Univ of Illinois archives) of Butkus and Capel side-by-side in uniform, two young men entering the prime of their lives. Butkus was a first-round draft pick of the Bears in 1965. Capel, attending Illinois on a ROTC scholarship and playing football as a walk-on, enlisted in the Marines following his graduation in 1965. He was killed in action in Vietnam in May 1966 almost exactly one year to the day from his graduation. Butkus has a college football award named after him. Capel's name lives on at Illinois in an award given annually to a player who best exemplifies courage, dedication and accomplishment during the season.

There are 57,000+ names on The Wall, the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, DC. I consider myself very fortunate that I do not know anyone personally on The Wall. But I like to believe every name has a story as compelling to someone as Capel's story was to me.

Tony B.

Really good post Yo tonyb.

thank you for mentioning the wall, yes I knew 7 men who died there, there were just kids 18-19-20 yrs old, to this day I hate lyndon Johnson for sending those kids to war, why did he get a library built for him?

Lyndon Johnson and General Westmoreland both were idiots.

Best ever: John Crown ... from my neighborhood when I was a kid playing street football.

Sam Huff of NY Giants--great linebacker.

That's the thing TB. How many young fans today ever heard of Huff, Jim Brown, Alex Karras, YA Tittle, or Roman Gabriel. That's why NFL Network's Top 10 is so unrealistic; if you don't see these guys play, you really can't rate them.

Kids 2day dont really know a thing about guys like Roman..(I remember as a kid when he came 2 us here in philly from the l.a. rams)..George Blanda,Tom Dempsey,Bob Greise, Roger Staubach etc..johnny unitas.

Part of that is revisionist history perpetuated by the NFL itself. For the most part, they act as though football began with Super Bowl I, ignoring the legacies of the players you've mentioned for the most part. I'm not sure what the rationale is for that, but I know I never really learned anything about early-era quarterbacks like Sammy Baugh and Otto Graham until I first read about them, then sought out footage of them on my own.

A lesser part is while some sports lend themselves to youtubing, football does not. It's very easy to watch old boxing matches like say Jack Dempsey vs Luis Angel Firpo and really get a sense of the fighters in a relatively small amount of time, but you can't hardly find youtube listings for entire NFL games that predate Super Bowl I. And if you did want to watch Super Bowl I, you would have to commit over 2 1/2 hours to it. And it's hard to get a real sense of every notable player from a single NFL game, even a Super Bowl.

I'd have to say Eric Dickerson.

Wanna hear a story? I already told the funny one about seeing Jackie Slater naked. Giggle. Here's a different one. A few guys from my high school went pro. One of them lived a few blocks away. I was a teenager back then hanging around outside my house talking to my friends. My friend's brother came down the street with Joe, the football player, a HUGE linebacker. (college player at that time). We were all talking and the brother started teasing and busting Joe. So, he got mad and went after the friend. Well, the friend jumped over our wooden fence and right behind him came Joe. But, Joe didn't make it over the fence. Instead, we all watched the fence collapse and break into two pieces. Oh man, I knew my Dad was going to be pissed. The friend knocked on the door. And there was Joe holding half the fence, that's how strong he was, telling my Dad, yeah I'm real sorry about breaking your fence lol.

My Dad was out there the next day putting it back together but it never looked the same again. When Joe went pro, he played for Green Bay in the 90's. My Dad would see him on television, he'd say There he is, that ^*#%+*# who broke my #+=*^#% fence.

Joe who? I can't pull names that far back besides the main guys...

I wanna say a packer, but have to say Barry sanders.

Brett favre was great when he was great...I would call him the most exciting player I ever saw.

Christian Vieri.