#1

 

JIM BROWN

Few things are certain in the world of sports arguments, but when it comes to production by a running back, the vast majority of fans agree that there has never been anyone quite like Jim Brown. My guess is that nobody ever will come close to matching his production over the course of a career. Brown did it all in just nine seasons with the Cleveland Browns and probably could have played another six years if he had been so inclined. However, he retired when he was at or near the peak of his capabilities so he could make movies in Hollywood—and make the cash that was not available in the NFL at the time.

How good was Brown? To the fans who watched from the stands or on television, he was a wrecking ball of a runner who closed out his career by running for 1,863 yards in 1963, 1,446 yards in ’64, and 1,544 yards in ’65. This was in the days when the league played a 14-game schedule, as opposed to the 16-game schedule they play today. To those who paid their money to see him play, Brown seemed to be a man among boys—quite simply the biggest, strongest and fastest man on the field

Those who were out on the field with him saw basically the same thing as those in the stands. That includes the fellow Hall of Famers who were tasked with bringing him down. Sam Huff, a Hall of Fame linebacker with the New York Giants and Washington Redskins, has spent a good portion of his post-football career talking about Brown’s talent. It is a subject that time has not diminished over the years. Huff, who has spent many years in the Washington broadcast booth, has never seen a back who was better or who even approached everything Brown could do on a football field.

“There have been backs who may have been quicker or faster and there are backs who have been bigger, but when you combine speed, strength, quickness, ability and desire, I don’t think there’s ever been anyone who was close to what Jim Brown could do when he was at his peak,” Huff said. “That peak was basically the whole of his career. I don’t remember him being slower near the end of his run or weaker. He was the most punishing player I have ever run across. I talked about desire a minute ago. I don’t know that his desire was about getting the extra yard or getting into the end zone. It was the desire to beat the man on the other side of the line of scrimmage. Jim played like he wanted to destroy your will. He would simply hurt you when he ran over you and that made it harder each time you had to face him.”

“My arms were my weapons,” Brown explained. “If you tried to tackle me high, I would use my arms to change your mind. If you tried to tackle me low, that was your choice. It didn’t usually work out so well.

“To stop me you would have had to get the best of me mentally. You would have had to make me fear you. That never happened and there was never that much pressure that could have been brought on me. That’s how I was able to assert my will.”

Brown was a four-time league MVP and also led the NFL in rushing in eight of his nine seasons. He averaged better than 100 yards per game (104) throughout the whole of his career, a record that stands to this day. He also never missed a game during his career due to illness, injury, or anything else. He averaged 5.2 yards per rush throughout his career even though the NFL average for nearly 50 years has been 4.0 yards per carry.

Brown accomplished all of this at a time when running the football really was the key to succeeding in the NFL, or at least it was a bigger part of the picture than it has been in the last 25 years. Coaches will still get in front of microphones today and tell you they must run the ball and stop the run in order to win and do it with a straight face. Ask Pittsburgh head coach Mike Tomlin how important running was in the Steelers’ last-minute drive to win Super Bowl XLIII. But when Brown played, a team that could run and stop the run had a great chance to win the title.

Defenses were stacked to stop him. Linebackers like Huff had no other assignment but to stop Brown and still couldn’t do it. He went over the 100-yard mark in nearly half the games he played in.

And then he left. Walking away after the 1965 season as the leading rusher in NFL history, his record 12,312 yards stood until Walter Payton surpassed the mark 19 years later. No disrespect to Payton (you’ll see him at No. 5 on this list), but as complete a player as he was, it took Payton 435 more carries than Brown to reach that mark.

Brown never had any major regrets about leaving the game early and pursue his acting career, either. “To leave at twenty-nine years old, MVP, having won the championship in ’64 and played for it in ’65. To go into the movies and break the color barrier and be in a sex scene with Raquel Welch. To get to be in The Dirty Dozen with some great actors. To make more money in one year than you damn near made in nine years of football. Everything about it was ingenious,” Brown told Esquire magazine in 2008.

Those that had to tackle Brown for a living were equally as regret-free that the Cleveland running back said goodbye to the game when he did. But the same cannot be said of the fans of the game that never had enough of watching the greatest running back in football history do what he did best. He played fearlessly and he did it in a way that put the fear of God in others. He falls just short of Joe Montana because he won only one title and could not take over a game in the crucial moments the way the quarterback could.