On Jim Brown, GOAT trope-ing, and the all-time running back room
Greatness in sports needs to be thought about in terms of practicality and versatility, not click-baity rankings. But please click on this post inspired by the death of an all-time NFL legend.
Jim Brown, almost needless to say, was a braver and blunter activist than anyone in the 20th century who might have been a better athlete than him. And he was a greater athlete than just about anyone else who was compelled to use their platform for advocacy.
All of that is for the talking heads and bona fide sports historians. The role here, if any, is to blow up terrible sports media talking point tropes like the draw play that unimaginative NFL offensive coordinators always call on second down and 10. The GOAT trope reared its ugly head on Friday following the news that the energy of Brown was returning to the earth: “He really was the greatest of all time, normally we think of that being Tom Brady, or Joe Montana.”
Please just stop. Any GOAT talk is too much GOAT talk and a fellow ought to be aware of it. There is only dominance in one’s time, in one’s era, so please do not coarsen the sport-geist further with your We Must Have A Ranking For Everything Reductionism. No sane person really believes they can compare a running back from the 1960s with a quarterback from the 21st century. And while I love sports statistics and knowing what went into creating them, just spouting them off hurts us all… hurts us all… hurts us all. Sorry to repeat myself, but it will help you remember.
Okay, esoteric armchair coach, how do you do it?
Whelp, the thought exercise is fairly straightforward. Or needlessly complicated.
You are the coach with full control of personnel for the team of Earthlings, the Gaia Goats1 who play varying football incarnations of the Monstars. So that is why you have been wearing the same clothes for three days that are thinly coated with the dust of a thousand Cheetos. You have been breaking down film!
On a week-to-week basis, you know not what era of football, what offensive and defensive schemes, and what weather conditions will confront the Goats. The breaking of the fourth dimension wall, though, will not include strategy. You won’t be able to show up in 1958 running a five-wideout no-huddle Air Raid. You can only use the most advanced contemporary tactics from that period.
That boils the argument down to choosing great players whose distinct talents are adaptable to any era.
I will not pretend to know enough to do it for the more technical position groups such as the offensive line and defensive line. There is enough general knowledge and love of football, and the game’s history, to take a stab at it with one of the glamour positions. At running back, though, the All-Time Top Five has become crystal-clear over years of hashing this out in the ol’ internal monologue.
The dual threat: Thurman Thomas (Buffalo, Miami, 1987-2000).
The job description calls for an every-down back who has the fluency of a wide receiver in the passing phase. The Jim Kelly, K-Gun Buffalo Bills were one of the first teams whose base offence was three wide receivers and a single back, and Thomas was graceful enough in that role that he had to be covered like a wideout.
Marshall Faulk has the statistical argument for this slot. Pro Football Reference only lists four RBs in the top 50 in Approximate Value, and Faulk is the second of the three. However, Faulk played all 12 of his seasons on dome teams. Thomas did it with the Buffalo Bills in a raw outdoor setting. And he actually had a higher yards-per-catch average over his career than Faulk.
The Swiss Army knife: Marcus Allen (L.A. Raiders, Kansas City, 1982-97)
A brilliant multitalented type is needed, and that is Allen, who played both fullback and halfback in the days when split-back sets were in vogue. The career arc of Allen is chequered since he played for the Raiders right when Al Davis was ramping up to live long enough to become the villain. Al Davis resented Allen for, well, reasons unknown. No one is ever going to say why, but if it was because Marcus Allen was friends with O.J. Simpson, well, point Davis.
Allen had a short peak, but he played 16 seasons in a position where the athletes are eternally viewed as fungible and replaceable parts. The black-ink feats are good enough, and Allen also checks boxes in four skillsets: rushing, blocking, receiving, and passing, since he was a high school quarterback before college at USC.
That durability and dependability get Allen over. The team is going to need depth when it is going up against opponents who think nothing of burning Foghorn Leghorn alive right in front of his teammates.
Home run hitter: Barry Sanders (Detroit, 1989-98)
Here was a dude who was so slippery an opposing coach actually obtained a live chicken for his players to chase in practice, while also having the lower-body strength of an Olympic weightlifter. For a Xennial, it is always going to come back to Barry Sanders as the greatest runner the game has ever seen, full stop, followed by Barry doing a 180-degree spin while three much larger defensive players crash into each other and he engages the afterburners for a 50-yard gain.
You might have heard some of the statistic floggers note that Jim Brown is the only player who averaged 100 rushing yards per game across his whole career. Or that he won eight NFL rushing titles in nine seasons, while no other player has won more than four.
Great, sure, but that is facts-minus-context. Sanders got his four titles in an era of 28 to 30 teams, while Brown performed in a league that was about half the size, with 12 to 14 teams. Brown was also, in modern parlance, a volume guy who was also explosive. He led the NFL in rush attempts six times as he illustrated it was possible for one player to amass 350 touches in a season.
Sanders never led the NFL in rush attempts. That was part of the design of the offence. Only the Detroit Lions would have ever acquired a generational runner at the exact same time they committed to the run-and-shoot scheme with four wide receivers and no blocking tight ends or H-backs. The kicker is it worked for them inasmuch as anything ever works for the Detroit Lions.2
Sanders averaged 99.8 per game over his career. Another 31 yards — so, one big run somewhere that stood instead of being called back by a holding penalty — would have given him 100 per game.
Power and finesse: Jim Brown (Cleveland, 1957-65)
This one requires the least explanation of all. The only comparisons for Jim Brown come from other sports.
He built himself a mantle as an activist, as you know. Football is an inward North American game, but there are elements of athleticism and charisma that are sort of like Pelé. A true celebrity athlete who defined an emerging American sports obsession for the masses? Brown is in a league there with Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth in early 20th-century baseball, Billie Jean King in tennis, and Mia Hamm in women’s soccer. And there is the have-to-mentions about the harms he caused with intimate partner violence, which seems to put him in league with far too many people.
Go on. Gaining acceptance for a marginalized population by being unapologetically awesome? There is a parallel between Brown as a Black man in the NFL during the first Civil Rights era and Maurice (Rocket) Richard as a Québécois star in the oh-so-Old Stock Canadian Original Six NHL. Yeah, I went there.
Also, as far as athletes who acted go, Brown must rank right up there. The cinephiles can go into The Dirty Dozen (1967) and the groundbreaking interracial sex scene with Raquel Welch in 100 Rifles (1970).
Brown, in a supporting performance that tells by showing, provided the moral centre to Oliver Stone’s pro football opus Any Given Sunday (1999). The film is a bit of a mess, but then again, so are most NFL games. It is not clear whether Oliver Stone even intended for Brown, who portrayed the Miami Sharks defensive coordinator3 Montezuma Monroe alongside Al Pacino chewing scenery as head coach Tony D’Amato, to fill that role. A lot of it that element seems intended for the idealistic young orthopedist played by Matthew Modine.
The supercut below holds up 24 years later. The post-loss bar scene with Brown and Pacino, with Brown’s Monroe wishing he could go back and coach high school football, hits the spot in showing two men who know they are on the other side of the generation gap, and do not know what comes next. The later scene also has Brown and Lawrence Taylor, playing a veteran Sharks linebacker named Luther (Shark) Lavay who has a permanent injury. It feels like whatever Brown put behind the dialogue is exactly what he said to many other footballers and athletes about being ready to leave the industry on one’s own terms before it leaves you. He also gives the perfect punctuation to the scene to remind you how effed-up this is, BUT FOOTBALL.
Brown was complex, and contradictory, and sometimes that puts off the public. But it does challenge us to question ourselves. I like that.
Speed, the toughest pound-for-pound, and everything else: Walter Payton (Chicago, 1975-87)
The spur for writing this list. Payton surpassed Brown as the all-time leading rusher and he did so against more formidable competition.
By the mid-1970s, NFL teams were taking scouting and drafting much more seriously than they had a generation earlier. Racial integration had also moved along. The credit for that largely goes to the rival AFL of the 1960s, which was much farther along in recognizing and respecting the drive, talent, and football smarts of Black players.4
So that is part of where we lay our scene for Walter Payton. He has a case for being the best all-around offensive player in the history sport. It’s not hard to look at his speed, balance, and strength, and clips of him airing it out on the halfback option pass to imagine that he could have played quarterback in the 2020s. He was taller than Kyler Murray. Or he could also doubled up as a defensive back in the ’30s or ’40s.
It has also been stated, many times, in many ways, that Payton achieved this without much of a supporting cast. The Chicago Bears, aka the Football Maple Leafs, seem to regard offence, particularly the passing phase, with deep-rooted suspicion. There is always that element in the fanbase and media predisposed to distrust anything modern. By gum, why is Auston Matthews not taking from what worked for Dave Keon? There, Dave Bidini, I just gave you your next book idea!5
Offensive linemen who block for a top rusher usually gain some cred in the media. But no Bears O-lineman appeared in the Pro Bowl during the first 10 seasons of Payton’s career. And it is not as though the Bears ever complemented Payton with a scary-good passing game.
One could belabour this point, and as a fan of the Minnesota Vikings who does not have one Super Bowl title from almost 40 years ago to dine out on, I will! The Bears are the only NFL team that has never had a quarterback put up a 4,000-yard season. Their all-time leading receiver, Johnny Morris, ranks No. 32 in yards gained by each of the 32 NFL teams’ all-time leading receivers. It might not surprise you that Johnny Morris’s final season came in, wait for it, 1967. What else in sports happened for the last time that year?
The other four running backs on this list all played with at least one wide receiver who either ended up in the Hall of Fame or was a multiple-times All-Pro.6 The Bears, across Payton’s 13 seasons, never had a QB pass for even 2,500 yards in a season, or a receiver who gained at least 850. And that was mostly during an era when teams were starting to explore the space created by a series of rule changes adopted in 1978 to favour the passing game.
Conclusion
So, yeah, that is the running back room for the Gaia Goats. Allen, Brown, Payton, Sanders, Thomas. There were other top-end compilers considered, and the lack of a 21st-century player does not bother me since the rushing phase of football now just provides service to the passing phase. Teams generally just desire a ‘one-cut’ runner who puts a cleat in the ground and can get gone.
The point, presuming there is one, is that fan theory and folk theory seem like a more healthful way to have these sports debates. They are always meaningless, but doing it this way seems so less maddening. At some point, we will try this with the receivers, quarterbacks, and back-seven (or eight) defenders.
Football is not really a beat here, but I have ingested enough of it over the last 3½ decades to rumble, bumble, stumble through it and sound like a semi-professional appreciator.
That is more than enough for now. Please stay safe, and be kind.
And their cheer team, the Green Goatesses. Yeah, I’m going on about four hours of sleep today.
Actual lede from an actual 1990 wire-service lede: “A year ago, people around the NFL were guessing how long it would take the Detroit Lions to toss their run-and-shoot offense on the scrap heap. Now they wonder who will be the first team to use it in a Super Bowl.” No team ever reached the Superb Owl using the run-and-shoot. However, its living legacy is advancing the use of slot receivers and option routes, where a receiver changes course based on the look offered by the defence.
Also, the run-and-shoot was used in a Grey Cup seven years before it was ever run in the NFL.
Brown, an all-time great running back, playing a defensive coach comments on an insidious bit of institutional NFL racism that did not get much airing in 1999. More often than not, Black coaches end up on defence and special teams. A Black defensive coordinator is far more common in the NFL than a Black offensive coordinator (OC). The Carolina Panthers are the only team with both.
Yet the OC of three of the last four Super Bowl-winning teams was Black — Eric Bieniemy of Kansas City in 2019 and’22, and Byron Leftwich with the 2020 Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Bieniemy still an OC, Leftwich is presently out of work, and the only white OC with a Super Bowl ring from the last four seasons, Kevin O’Connell, is now coaching the Vikings.
So, damn, Oliver Stone was on to something.
At the conclusion of the AFL’s fifth season, the league was supposed to have a postseason all-star game in New Orleans. Sadly, just six months after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, the 21 Black performers on all-star teams faced “numerous instances of racism in New Orleans during the build-up to the game, and voted to stage a boycott, with some white players saying they would join with and also boycott the game.”
Their collective action led to the AFL moving the game to Houston. Did New Orleans suffer for this? Hell, no! The following year, the NFL granted the New Orleans Saints expansion franchise. Also, TIL that the Saints’ black and gold colours were chosen to represent “strong (local) ties to the oil industry.” Eww.
Dave Bidini wrote a very good personal memoir called, Keon And Me. If you read it, maybe he will unblock me on Twitter. To be fair, I earned that block.
Herman Moore was a three-time All-Pro wide receiver for the Detroit Lions. He is not in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.