Let’s start this off with a radical statement: being one of the top-100 football players of all-time is not an easy accomplishment. Shocking, I know. That declaration, however, is not meant to be limited to the literal sense. Considering just .08% of high school football players make it to the NFL, it’s pretty evident how hard it is just to get to the NFL, let alone excel. What might not be as evident is how hard it is to perform at a top-100 level in the relative sense. The NBA/ABA has had just under 5,000 players in its history. Putting together the top-100 players in professional basketball history requires selecting the top 2% of all the players who ever played. The NFL, on the other hand, has had just under 27,000 players in its history. The top 2% of players in NFL history would result in 540 players. In other words, being one of the top-540 players in NFL history is equivalent to being one of the top-100 players in NBA history. Think about how unlikely it is that a player entering the NBA will end up being one of the top-100 basketball players of all-time. Well, it’s 5.4 times more difficult than that for an NFL player to achieve the same status in football. Since nobody (including me) sets out to identify the top-540 players in any sport, it just means that a massive list of deserving players needs to be whittled down to 100. Given the relative unfairness of the football top-100 list compared to other sports, it is imperative that it is put together as judiciously as possible while fully acknowledging the many superlative football players among the omissions. Below are some of the factors and parameters that I leaned on to get to the fairest list possible.

Position Distribution

It would be pretty easy to toss 40 QBs into the top-100, pull 60 from other positions, and call it a wrap. QBs get the most accolades and deservedly so. They have a disproportionate impact on the outcome of games and should have a disproportionate presence in the top-100. However, there are at least 13 different positions in non-special teams play. It’s important to the integrity of the list that it not be skewed too heavily towards offense or defense, and that the distribution of positions is commensurate to the relative value of each position. Specific quotas were not used, but I did make it a point to start with a similarly-sized pool of players from each position group to guarantee certain position groups weren’t handicapped before the process even started. I also made it a point to specifically scrutinize the quarterback and skill positions to avoid too heavy and too light an emphasis due to the tendency for those positions to receive the most publicity.  Although I won’t be adhering to a positional quota as the list evolves, here is the very first iteration of the top 100 (released in January, 2021) just to give an example of what a positional breakdown might look like:

Offense (51)       Defense (49)

QB 14                    DE 10    

RB 10                    OLB 9

WR 8                      CB 9

OT 8                       MLB 8

G 7                         DT 8                      

TE 3                        S 5

C 1

Five-year Requirement

In order to qualify for the top-100, a player needs five years of service. There have been too many great players in NFL history for a player to reach the top-100 in just four years. The five-year mark is pushing it too, but I think there are rare exceptions who have accomplished enough by the five-year mark. This is especially true at running back given the average shelf life of the position. Earl Campbell was awarded the AP Offensive Player of the Year his first three years in the league (tied with Marshall Faulk for most all-time) and the 1979 MVP while leading the league in rushing three times and touchdowns twice. By his fourth season, Campbell had amassed 6,457 career yards and 55 touchdowns. Considering his hardware and the number of times leading the league in yards and touchdowns, it doesn’t take much of an effort to justify Campbell’s inclusion in the top-100 after just five seasons. The five-year requirement will also act as an artificial check on overreacting to the next big thing.

Special Teams

Kickers, punters, and returners are pivotal to team success and they have provided some of the most exciting moments in NFL history. However, while the units themselves are important, special teams players participate in a disproportionately small number of plays in a given game. For example, Ray Guy—one of the great punters in NFL history—played roughly 1,049 snaps over his 14-year career. Randall McDaniel—one of the great guards in NFL history—played approximately 14,300 snaps over his 14-year career.  Over the same career length, McDaniel played roughly 14 times the number of snaps as Guy. There’s simply too much of a discrepancy in playing time for any special teams player to break the top-100 over an every-down player. If I had 540 spots to fill, then Devin Hester, Adam Vinatieri, and Ray Guy would undoubtedly have a home.

Regular Season vs. Playoffs

As we established above, the top-100 players in the NBA are equivalent to the top-540 players in the NFL when adjusted for player population. Trying to squeeze 540 players into 100 spots creates a traffic jam every bit as gridlocked as the Dan Ryan Expressway with the added pleasure of a horse galloping in the right lane. Differentiating between nearly identical resumes quickly devolves into a game of picking the most dapper Oompa-Loompa (spoiler: they all look the same). So, it is important to identify distinguishing characteristics to help establish a hierarchy among equally deserving players. To fairly compare two elite players to each other, we first need to consider the entire resume.  While regular-season success gives the best apples-to-apples comparison, it’s often necessary to lean on playoff success to provide the differentiator. The two most prominent examples of this are comparisons of Tom Brady to Peyton Manning and Emmitt Smith to Barry Sanders. The four engaged in epic regular-season duels, Brady and Manning battling back and forth for league MVP for 15 years, and Emmitt and Barry engaging in a 9-year war for the regular season rushing crown. All four are safely among the top-25 players in NFL history on regular-season accolades alone. In both instances, however, one player has a massive advantage over the other in playoff performance. There is no doubt that access to the playoffs is largely dependent on what franchise a player has had the (mis)fortune of playing for which is why “playoff success” needs to be narrowly defined. For the purposes of player comparisons, “playoff success” references individual performance, not simply just playing on a good team. Tom Brady has been to nine Super Bowls and won six of them. He wasn’t just along for the ride; he was the ride. His four Super Bowl MVPs are the most in NFL history—only four others have won it more than once—and he’s the all-time playoff and Super Bowl leader in passing yards and passing touchdowns. It’s true that he played for a great organization, but Brady played the quarterback position in the playoffs against the most difficult competition in the league better than any quarterback in history. It’s a similar story for Emmitt Smith. He was the workhorse who powered the Dallas Cowboys dynasty to three Super Bowl championships. He is the all-time playoff leader in rushing yards and rushing touchdowns. E. Smith didn’t just get the opportunity to play in the playoffs, he performed better at his position than any player in playoff history. It’s true that Brady and E. Smith played for better teams but it’s not the opportunities that get them rated so highly; rather, it’s what they did with those opportunities on the biggest stage against the most difficult competition.     

League Size

Jim Brown and Don Hutson are universally considered two of the greatest players in NFL history. Brown led the NFL in rushing yards eight times and rushing touchdowns five times. Hutson led the NFL in receiving yards seven times and receiving touchdowns nine times. Those are eye-popping accomplishments to be sure, but there’s a reason we’ve never seen anything like that since and probably won’t see anything like that ever again. Hutson and Brown entered the NFL when there were just 10 and 12 teams, respectively. There are currently 32 teams in the NFL. Using “number of times leading the league” as a metric to rate Brown and Hutson against modern players is not helpful unless it is put into the proper context. For instance, Emmitt Smith led the NFL in rushing yards four times and rushing touchdowns three times in a league that had anywhere from 28-30 teams depending on the year. Since the NFL/AFL merger in 1970, no player has led the league in rushing yards or rushing touchdowns more often than E. Smith. Is that more impressive than what Jim Brown did in a 12-team league? Statistically speaking, it might be. E. Smith’s league-leading marks actually outpace Brown’s when adjusted for league size. Randy Moss led the NFL in receiving touchdowns five times. Since the NFL/AFL merger, Jerry Rice is the only other player to lead the league more than three times. Are Moss’s accomplishments more impressive than what Hutson did in a 10-team league? The math certainly seems to indicate that it is. Moss played in a league that had three times the number of players making it three times harder to lead the league in touchdowns. Adjusted for league size, Moss’s league-leading touchdown count far exceeds Hutson’s.     

A similar dance plays out when comparing Johnny Unitas to Brett Favre. Unitas won the NFL MVP three times. The number of teams in the league when he won each MVP, respectively, was 12, 14, and 16. Favre also won the NFL MVP three times. There were 30 teams in the NFL when Favre won his MVPs. Being voted the best in a league with 1,380 active players is a much more impressive feat than being voted the best in a league with 640 active players. Similarly, both players led the NFL in passing touchdowns four times. Favre had to throw more touchdown passes than 29 other starting quarterbacks each season to accomplish this feat. Unitas had to beat out anywhere from 11-15 depending on the year. In a comparison between Favre and Unitas where both have similar career accomplishments, it would be a disservice to Favre not to factor in the heightened degree-of-difficulty under which he carved out his resume.

 

Composition of the League

Let’s stick with the Unitas/Favre comparison. In 1964, when Unitas won his first NFL MVP, there were two major professional football leagues: the NFL and the AFL. The NFL had 560 active players in 1964. The AFL—a league that would prove its mettle by winning four of the first eight Super Bowls—had 272 active players. Of the 832 active-roster professional football players in 1964, Unitas played in a league with 67% of them. Additionally, NFL teams had quotas on the number of black players that could be on their rosters, significantly reducing the talent level leaguewide. Brett Favre had no such luxury. By the time Favre won his first MVP in 1995, the NFL and AFL had long since consolidated, and the shameful quotas on black players had been lifted, resulting in 100% of the best professional football players making their home in the NFL. While both Unitas and Favre each won three MVPs, a deeper look reveals that Favre’s were considerably more difficult to achieve. Unitas isn’t the only Hall-of-Fame player who benefited from a watered-down league prior to the merger. Other great players from the 60s who played in the NFL when it had only 67% of the available talent pool and restrictive quotas on black players include Jim Brown, Gino Marchetti, Bob Lilly, Deacon Jones, Ray Nitschke, Bart Starr, Forrest Gregg, and Merlin Olsen.   

Versatility

Mastering one position in the NFL is hard enough; doing it at 3+ positions is indicative of a truly special football player. The rare player who excels at multiple positions is incredibly valuable and that value is reflected in the top-100. Rod Woodson was selected as a 1^st-team All-Pro at an NFL record three different positions (CB, S, KR). He was also an above-average punt-returner making him a four-position contributor. Deion Sanders was selected as a 1^st-team All-Pro at two different positions (CB, KR) while also being one of the best punt-returners in the game. Sanders was so versatile that he scored 22 career touchdowns in six different ways (rushing, receiving, punt return, kick return, fumble return, and interception return) which is unheard of for a defensive player. Bruce Matthews played at least 16 games at all five positions on the offensive line making him the most versatile—and perhaps greatest—offensive lineman of all-time. Like R. Woodson, he was selected as a 1^st-team All-Pro at three different positions (LG, RG, C).  R. Woodson, D. Sanders, and B. Matthews are universally considered all-time greats at their primary positions but it’s their versatility that gets them into the top-25. Other players whose versatility bolstered their resumes include Ronnie Lott, Charles Woodson, Antonio Brown, Sammy Baugh, and Chuck Bednarik.

Hardware

In the NFL, hardware isn’t just bling; it’s your ticket to the Hall of Fame and status as one of the greatest players to ever play. There are certain achievements that pretty much guarantee a player’s place among the top-100. Since the AP MVP Award was first given out in 1958, there have been nine players who have won multiple AP NFL MVP Awards; eight are in the top-100. Of that group, only Kurt Warner misses out. The AP Defensive Player of the Year Award has been given out 49 times since its inception in 1971; 33 of the 49 recipients are in the top-100. There have been eight players who have won multiple AP Defensive Player of the Year Awards; not only are all eight in the top 100 but they’re all in the top-30. Ten players have won an AP NFL MVP and a Super Bowl MVP; eight are in the top-100 and a ninth—Patrick Mahomes—is all but assured a spot in the future. Again, only Kurt Warner misses out on the top-100 which brings us to…

Kurt Warner

Kurt Warner is the most difficult omission for me which is counterintuitive considering there are other players who didn’t make the list who would be added before Warner. What makes Warner’s omission uneasy is the elite company he keeps. As I mentioned above, there have been nine players who have won multiple AP MVP Awards and Warner is the only one who didn’t make the top-100. Similarly, there have been ten players who won an AP NFL MVP and a Super Bowl MVP and Warner is the only player of that group who won’t end up on the list. Perhaps most difficult to overlook is the fact that Warner is one of only seven players in history to have multiple AP NFL MVPs and a Super Bowl MVP. The other six to accomplish that feat aren’t just in the top-100, they’re in the top 50. So, why isn’t Warner in the top 100? First, there’s no doubt that Warner would make a list of, say, the top-200, which is no small feat in a league that has played home to 27,000 players. The factor that keeps Warner out of the top-100 is simply longevity. Warner only started 116 games in his career while winning just 58% of them (no modern quarterback in the top-100 has a winning percentage below 60%). Warner not becoming a starter until he was 28 played a role in limiting his career but he was also plagued by injuries as evidenced by the fact that he started 12+ games in a season just four times. In fact, he only put together four seasons that can even be considered above-average. There are simply too many great players who performed at an elite level over a much longer period of time to include Warner in the top-100. Steve Young only started 143 games and—like Warner—doesn’t have the career counting stats to measure up against the other great quarterbacks on the list. However, what gets Young on the list is what he did with his relatively short time in the league. Young led the league in QB rating six times, completion percentage five times, yards per attempt five times and touchdown passes four times. He is 2^nd all-time in rushing touchdowns by a QB and won 66% of his games as a starter while also duplicating Warner’s two MVPs and a Super Bowl MVP.

Terry Bradshaw

It might be becoming cliché to keep Bradshaw off top-100 lists—so cliché, in fact, that I considered the possibility before ultimately deciding at the 2-minute warning that his hardware collection is still top-100 worthy. Although there were contemporary quarterbacks who statistically outperformed Bradshaw in the regular season who aren’t in the top-100, including Dave Anderson, Bradshaw was pretty successful in the regular season in his own right, winning an AP MVP and leading the league in touchdown passes twice. While that certainly doesn’t hurt Bradshaw’s profile, it’s what he did in the post-season that still stands the test of time. Bradshaw won four Super Bowls (behind only Tom Brady in NFL history) and is one of only five players to win multiple Super Bowl MVPs. Only Bradshaw, Brady, and Joe Montana won at least four Super Bowls, at least two Super Bowl MVPs, and at least one AP NFL MVP. Additionally, Bradshaw has the highest winning percentage in postseason history among quarterbacks who have played at least 10 playoff games. Although Bradshaw’s residency in the top-100 will come to an end sooner than later, he still has a few years before his lease is up.

Steve Van Buren vs. Terrell Davis

Walking through this player comparison will help illuminate how using sound logic and reasoning help avoid making the same mistakes that led to the NFL’s 100^th Anniversary All-Time Team being so overrepresented by players who debuted prior to NFL/AFL merger in 1970. To reiterate, only 33% of all the players in NFL history played before the merger, yet 49% of the players included on the NFL’s own top-100 list played prior to 1970. This era featured small leagues, rival leagues, and a ban/quota on black players, making this the easiest era to succeed the NFL has ever seen. We need to make sure to factor this in. Now, let’s get started with the comp…

First, it’s important to establish that Terrell Davis is not a top-100 player. He was an absolute beast of a running back who may have had the highest three-year peak of all-time, but he simply did not stay healthy for long enough to sneak into the top-100. Although T. Davis is not a top-100 player, he can be very useful as a gatekeeper of sorts for running backs looking to break into the top-100. In the simplest terms, if a running back can’t beat T. Davis, then the top-100 is out of reach. Steve Van Buren has universally been included on top-100 lists for the last 60 years. He was undoubtedly one of the NFL’s biggest stars before the merger. He was named to the Pro Football Hall of Fame’s 1940s All-Decade Team and enshrined in Canton in 1965. However, when we adjust his career for league size and demographic factors, it becomes obvious that his resume falls short of T. Davis’s, let alone the top-100.

Van Buren led the NFL in rushing yards four times, touchdowns four times, and total yards from scrimmage twice. He did this in a 10-team league. T. Davis led the league in touchdowns twice, yards from scrimmage twice, and rushing yards once. He also finished second in rushing yards twice. He did this in a 30-team league. In a league with three times the players, it is three times as difficult to lead the league in statistical categories making each of Davis’s second-place finishes in rushing yardage more impressive than Van Buren’s 1^st place finishes. Adjusted for league size, Davis was statistically more impressive in the regular season including what is arguably the greatest season by a running back in NFL history when he became the first and only running back to rush for 2,000 yards and 20 touchdowns in the same season. He was named the NFL MVP in 1998 and the NFL Offensive Player of the Year in 1996 and 1998. Van Buren did not win an MVP award and would’ve needed to win three MVPs and six Offensive Player of the Year awards just to keep pace. Davis even played more regular-season games than Van Buren which is ironic considering Van Buren’s longevity doesn’t seem to be questioned while everyone agrees that Davis’s candidacy for the top-100 is torpedoed by career length. Then there’s the postseason…

T. Davis has arguably the most impressive per-game postseason statistics of any player in NFL history. In eight career playoff games, Davis ran for 12 touchdowns and averaged 142.5 yards-per-game at a 5.59 yards-per-carry clip. The Broncos rode Davis to seven consecutive playoff wins, resulting in back-to-back Super Bowl victories. He took home one Super Bowl MVP and would’ve won a second behind a 162-yard effort in Super Bowl XXXIII had Howard Griffith–his teammate–not “vultured” two 1-yard touchdowns. Van Buren, for his part, rushed for two touchdowns and averaged 91.3 yards-per-game at a 3.92 yards-per-carry clip in four playoff games including back-to-back NFL Championship Game victories.

While Van Buren is almost universally considered a top-100 player in NFL history, Terrell Davis is not. Although there isn’t a justification for those opinions to exist in tandem, it is conventional wisdom nonetheless. This is just one example that reveals how badly the methods we have historically used to compile the all-time greats are in need of recalibration.

O-Line

If we were to put together a list of the top-100 offensive linemen in NFL history, the 100^th player on that list would be a really good player. Frustratingly, there’s only room for a fraction of that number. Making matters more difficult is that a metric to judge the historical significance of offensive linemen has been the “white rabbit” of NFL statistics for as long as the league has existed. While the technical ability that is required to excel on the offensive line in the NFL is arguably the most difficult to master in football, it is also the least statistically quantifiable making the three spots on the line the most difficult to rank of all NFL positions. With the addition of Pro Football Focus to the landscape, there is hope that differentiating between two great offensive linemen will be easier in the future. In the meantime, ranking offensive linemen pretty much boils down to the inexact science of finding the players who have the greatest combination of honors and longevity, while also accounting for playoff success, sacks allowed, and historic production in the running game. The average profile of the offensive linemen in the top-100 who debuted after the merger in 1970 is 202 games started, 10 Pro Bowls, and seven 1^st team All-Pro selections. Future players who manage to achieve a similar profile will likely find a path into the top-100.  

Playoff Format

Prior to Super Bowl I in 1967, winning the NFL Championship required winning one playoff game. Otto Graham won seven championships and it took him just seven games to do it (not counting tiebreakers). Tom Brady won six Super Bowls and it took him 18 games to do it. Quarterbacks pre-1970 had a considerably easier route to winning a championship than the quarterbacks who followed. As a result, you will find quarterbacks pre-merger rated lower than might be expected based on their championships—or in some cases—not rated at all.

In The Recalibration, we established that degree-of-difficulty is a vital element to inter-era player comparisons. If we ignore this component, our ability to thread an accurate narrative of the greatest players throughout history is DOA. That might sound a bit dramatic, but we don’t have to use hypotheticals to imagine the ramifications of forging ahead without accounting for competition level. We only need to look to the NFL’s 100th Anniversary All-Time Team (49 of top-100 debuted before 1970) or the Sporting News’s list of the 100 Greatest Baseball Players (entire top-25 debuted before 1968) to see that ignoring degree-of-difficulty results in a list dominated by players who played during the weakest eras in history. Although adjusting for league strength is imperative, we need to clarify what we mean—and don’t mean—by league strength. 

If Babe Ruth were teleported from 1921 to the present, he would probably be drunk. After sobering up, he would quickly find that he became a crummy baseball player overnight. Player development has advanced far beyond anything anyone from Ruth’s era ever could’ve imagined. Pitchers throw harder and have better control than a century ago. They master more offerings, sequence better, and rarely tip pitches. Due to the significant increase in average pitcher height, they throw on a more exaggerated downhill plane and release the ball closer to the plate than ever before. Since starting pitchers throw so much harder, they also don’t stick around for hitters to see them a 3rd, 4th, and 5th time through the lineup to offer up the tasty meatballs that Ruth undoubtedly feasted on. 

Modern hitters have evolved in several ways to combat these pitching advances. They are bigger, stronger, and have better hand-eye coordination leading to steeper launch angles and higher exit velocities. While Ruth had prodigious power, there is little chance he had the quick-twitch reflexes necessary to make use of it in today’s highly-specialized game. It would be hard to imagine Ruth outhitting even the worst hitter in MLB today today. His base-running and defense would be so poor that there’s a decent chance he would be escorted off the field before even getting a chance to swing a bat. Unfortunately for The Bambino, since teleporting doesn’t include evolution by osmosis, he would need to try his hand at another skill like competitive eating if he’s planning on sticking around. While this is a fun thought-experiment, this is not our definition of degree-of-difficulty. Ruth’s greatness should not be determined by the teleportation test.  

Now that we’ve defined what degree-of-difficulty isn’t, let’s define what it is. For the purposes of inter-era player comparisons, it will reflect the following:  

1. The overall number of opponents that a player competes against to lead the league in statistical categories and win awards.
2. The number of games required to win a championship.
3. The percentage of the best available talent present in the league.
4. The size of the global pool populating the league.

The first part of our definition is the easiest to quantify. MLB today is close to twice the size as it was when Ruth played, meaning he only had to outperform half the players to lead the league in statistical categories compared to modern players. In other words, it’s easier to hit more home runs than 225 people than it is to hit more home runs than 450. Similarly, Ruth’s Yankees only needed to win four games to win the World Series, while the Dodgers had to win 13 games in 2020 to take home the championship. It’s not a coincidence that dynasties—in all sports—simply don’t exist the way they used to when there were fewer teams to beat and fewer games to win.

The third part of our definition is, thankfully, an artifact of the past. While current major leaguers compete against all the best baseball players in the sport, the same cannot be said for Ruth. MLB’s ban on black and Latino players watered down the overall quality of play during his career. To get an idea of what was missing, consider that in the 33 years following Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier in 1947, black players won 30 league MVPs. There is no question that Ruth benefited from not having to compete against Josh Gibson, Turkey Stearnes, and Oscar Charleston, all prolific home run hitters active during his career. 

Lastly, we need to account for MLB’s shift from a national organization to a global one. There were more international players on MLB rosters in 2020 than total players in the American League in 1921. Baseball’s popularity has exploded around the globe, making it harder than ever to reach the majors. This is the classic big fish in a little pond vs. big fish in a big pond scenario. There’s a reason why the smart money is almost always on the latter.

As we conduct inter-era player comparisons in baseball going back to the 1890s, we will notice that degree-of-difficulty becomes less of a factor with each passing generation, and it mostly stopped being a factor altogether by the mid-1990s. The number of teams in MLB has held steady since 1998. Despite constant tinkering, the number of games required to win a championship has remained mostly consistent since the wild card was first used in 1995; and most importantly, MLB has been a global enterprise welcome to all players for decades. Unless MLB chooses to undergo a significant expansion in the future, we should be able to rely on performance relative to peers as our sole method for comparing any two players who played after 1994. For all other comparisons, we’ll need to account for degree-of-difficulty according to our stated definition. Happy scrolling!

We rely on lore to form our earliest conceptions of history. Those conceptions root deeply into our self-identify, often growing unchecked for years before ever facing a real challenge from logic—and by that time, many of us are hardly interested in a perspective change. Even though these early conceptions manifest into powerfully held beliefs, the seeds are often planted innocuously. In 6th grade, I had a gym teacher who wore a cowboy hat and boots whether he was on the basketball court or pool deck. His name was Bob Eller. My dad called him Carl. He said it was a reference to the Purple People Eaters and their Hall-of-Fame defensive end, named Carl Eller, who terrorized NFL quarterbacks in the 1970s. It didn’t take long before Bob became Carl to me, too. That conversation—a two-minute conversation hardly filled with hard-hitting analysis—anchored into my psyche, growing unimpeded, year-after-year, until Eller’s greatness became a matter of fact to me. Just a few words from one encounter created a narrative that would orbit my brain for a lifetime. Of course, that encounter was with my dad, who, naturally, wielded the power of a thousand impressions. Over time, he would share similar praise of Pistol Pete, Yaz, and The Sheik—all of whom would become larger than life to me. 

This embedding happens to all of us. Parents bonding with their children over sports is a ritual as American as Clark W. Griswold Jr. Much like Clark, it also comes with endearing flaws—approximately 25,000 incandescent bulbs worth to be exact. There is no more impressionable creature on Earth than a human child. We are drawn to anecdotal hyperbole because it allows us the limitless reaches of our imagination. Since we have a vested interest in championing our childhood narratives as adults, this dynamic leads to some pretty strong opinions that never face the rigor of scrutiny. In the real world, blindly following narratives has been the root of pretty much every human conflict that has ever existed. Impassioned disagreements fueled by ignorance is how we get racism and war. The stakes aren’t as high when the subject is sports, but the resolve to defend an opinion is every bit as strong. We can shed these bad habits by looking for reasons to embrace new perspectives instead of looking for excuses to hold on to old ones. The key is to remove personal biases from the equation by allowing critical thinking to be our guide. 

Dick Butkus was a brutal tackler who was named 1st team All-Pro six times during his Hall-of-Fame career. Some consider him the most prolific middle linebacker of all-time, even ahead of Ray Lewis. While both were undoubtedly great players, the difference between their resumes is roughly the difference between Teen Wolf (epic) and Teen Wolf Too (way less epic). Lewis is a two-time Super Bowl winner who was the linchpin to perhaps the greatest defense of all-time. He is the only player in NFL history with two Defensive Player of the Year Awards and a Super Bowl MVP. He has the most All-Pro (9) and Pro Bowl (13) selections of any middle linebacker in NFL history. He holds the NFL career record for most solo and combined tackles and is the only player in NFL history with at least 40 interceptions and 30 sacks. He also played 109 more games than Butkus and did so in a league double the size, making it twice as difficult to be named All-Pro. The fact that Butkus still gets metioned as potentially the greatest of all-time (GOAT) at middle linebacker shows just how influential the power of suggestion can be. Whether it was from watching him firsthand or hearing stories recounting his legendary toughness, people who grew up idolizing Butkus don’t just think he is the GOAT, they need to think he’s the GOAT. Not doing so would be akin to a personal betrayal, and a betrayal to Butkus himself. 

While exaggerating the greatness of historical athletes is a harmless exercise that leads to verbal insults at worst, and forges familial bonds at best, it has wreaked havoc on our ability to identify the greatest players of all-time. Take the NFL’s 100th Anniversary All-Time Team featuring its selection of the 100 greatest players of all-time, for instance. With a little help from Pro-Football Reference and some sample-size witchcraft using surnames beginning with S, we can surmise that approximately 34% of all NFL players debuted before the NFL/AFL merger in 1970. Yet, the NFL included a whopping 49 players from this era on its 100th Anniversary Team. While the NFL has a clear interest in overpromoting its history to its fans, this is unquestionably a poor representation of elite player distribution. The NFL didn’t just choose nearly half of its selections from an era in which the vast majority of players didn’t play, it chose them from an era in which black players—even those who starred in college at major universities—were banned outright or subjected to minuscule quotas. The NFL also chose nearly half of its selections from an era that had anywhere from 1/2 to 1/3 of the teams it has today, making it 2-3 times easier to win a championship or an MVP, lead the league in statistical categories, and be selected an All-Pro. As if that doesn’t massively tilt the scale against the modern player enough, the NFL chose nearly half of its selections from an era when the AFL was siphoning talent from the NFL, decreasing the average level of competition that NFL players had to face. All of these factors should work in tandem to deflate the accomplishments of players before 1970. Instead, those accomplishments have been inflated, resulting in an extraordinarily inaccurate depiction of the NFL’s greatest players. If this statistical tomfoolery was limited to the NFL, then we could maybe let it slide with a quick side-eye—and if the source of these oversights was limited to just the NFL, I wouldn’t be this deep into an essay titled The Recalibration. Unfortunately, this a pervasive practice in the sports industry not limited to an organization or a news outlet. 

If we’re interested in a more accurate representation of the greatest players of all-time, we need to recalibrate how we approach inter-era player comparisons. We can do this by focusing on competitive inequities. Let’s stick with football and take a look at how a logic-based approach works in practice by comparing two players with very similar profiles—one debuting in 1961 before the NFL/AFL merger and the other in 1975 after the merger. The Dallas Cowboys have had the luxury of suiting-up two of the greatest defensive tackles of all-time: Bob Lilly and Randy White. It should come as no surprise that Lilly is almost universally rated higher by fans and historians since he was Dallas’s first superstar player. It would be nearly impossible for any player to exceed the impression he made on the Cowboys faithful, let alone one playing the same position just a few years later like White. However, to reestablish order and consistency to our representations of the top-100 players, we need to remove immaterial factors like popularity from the equation. Once we do that, it doesn’t take long for a clear picture to come into focus.

White had a longer career, was better at getting to the QB, and won a Super Bowl MVP. Even Pro-Football-Reference’s Career Average Value stat—a measure that should favor Lilly since it doesn’t take into account competition level—results in a deadlock. Every statistical measure we have either favors Randy White or ends in a stalemate, and that’s taking everything at face value. When we adjust for relative competition level and league size, the gap only widens. Although it’s not Lilly’s fault that the AFL existed and the NFL limited access to black players, he benefited nonetheless. Both factors significantly reduced the offensive line talent tasked to block Lilly and the defensive tackle talent he had to beat for individual honors. White, on the other hand, competed against all the best football players in the sport. The league was also double the size, making it twice as difficult for White to be named All-Pro. Despite the conventional wisdom that has suggested otherwise for decades, there is no way we can reasonably move forward with the narrative that Lilly had the superior career.

Even though rating players is a subjective exercise, we have plenty of precedent in the sports world using degree-of-difficulty to inform our opinions. Diving and gymnastics are decided subjectively by judges, and those sports have had the wisdom to slap a degree-of-difficulty multiplier on athletic performance. Not doing so would result in a contest that would essentially come down to who could complete the most novice dive—or routine—the most flawlessly. That would hardly yield an accurate representation of the best in the world. Yet, that has historically been our approach to comparing professional athletes. 

Every major North American sports league has undergone the same evolution from small and exclusive to large and global. Since list-makers have historically not accounted for this change, the chronicling of the 100 greatest players of all-time—in all sports—is badly in need of a recalibration. We can take this on in earnest by focusing on league size and demographics when comparing player legacies. This exercise might be uncomfortable at first, but the payoff will be a more accurate representation of performance while also having a better appreciation for the talents of modern players who, with little exception, are competing in the most competitive era in history. Happy scrolling!