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When I was a kid, Emmitt Smith, Barry Sanders and Thurman Thomas were among the sport’s brightest stars, and running backs hadn’t yet been devalued. Sanders spent much of that time pacing to break Walter Payton’s rushing record, something Smith eventually wound up doing, and Thomas set the mold for the new age of tailback.
And yes, my dad never let me forget who the greatest was.
The greatest was Brown, who died Thursday at the age of 87.
Context is important here, in large part because football isn’t a sport that lends itself to raw numbers telling the full story. The game has changed too much over the years to compare eras, and for that reason I think the best comps for Brown, as a player, are in other sports.
Namely, I see Babe Ruth and Wilt Chamberlain as his peers—athletes who were so physically dominant in an earlier time for their sports that statistics can’t do them justice. But if you’re insistent on coming up with a numerical measure, like Chamberlain’s 100-point game or Ruth’s 60-homer season (the players who finished tied for third in home runs that year had 30), I think it’s in the gap between Brown and everyone else when he played.
A look …
• Brown won eight rushing titles in nine years as a pro, winning the rushing title in those years by 242, 736, 293, 156, 101, 845, 277 and 667 yards, respectively.
• When he retired, he had seasons No. 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 8 and 9 on the single-season rushing leaderboard in NFL history.
• He walked away as the game’s all-time leading rusher, with 12,312 yards. At the time, after the 1965 season, Joe Perry was second with 9,732 yards, Jim Taylor was third at 7,502 and John Henry Johnson was fourth at 6,577.
• He won three NFL MVPs, and a championship during the league’s Vince Lombardi era.
• He’s the only player in NFL history to average more than 100 rushing yards per game over an entire career.
And to kids like me, who never saw him play, there was a Paul Bunyan–like quality to the way Brown was described, very much like you’d hear people talk about Chamberlain and Ruth. Which is why, if you put together a nuanced picture of who Brown was on the field, it’s not hard to get to a place where you, like my dad, would think Brown was the greatest.
Someone else with some credibility once said it, too.
“The greatest football player ever,” Bill Belichick told ’s Tim Layden in 2015, “no doubt.”
