Top 10 Defensive Players of All Time

[DukeSlater]

Dick Lane has to be in the top five.

Merlin Olsen should be in there, IMO.

[TanksAndSpartans]

The only complete game I've ever seen of Page was SB VIII. I only saw it once and I certainly didn't analyze it for line play, but at a high level I'd say the Dolphins neutralized him. Fair tor not, I'm always impressed when players have great games in big games.

I'm glad to see Hein and Cal Hubbard (briefly) got mentions - its usually pretty tough for the players from the early days to wind up on any of these lists. There'd be no argument from me in including those two. The oral history of Bill Hewitt making a lot of plays in the opponents' backfield came to mind for me - if any film of him exists though, I haven't seen it. I vaguely recall a joke in a PFRA article about Hewitt having more sacks than Deacon Jones. The next one I thought of is Sammy Baugh - not just because of the interceptions, but in some highlights I saw against the Bears, there was at least one play where he came up to the line and made a play against Nagurski - I've seen some other highlights from that era and I just didn't notice other single wing tailbacks coming up to the line to make plays on defense - I had the sense they may have been content to stay in a safety role. Speaking of Nagurski, when asked about his relatively low number of carries, I think he mentioned something to the effect of George needing him to play a complete game on defense and when asked in the 70s?, at least from what I can recall, he said he would play LB in the modern game. And when you think of Nagurski, one of his rivals comes to mind.... I remember there was an SI article where the author was reviewing film of Nagurski and said Clarke Hinkle just jumped out at him. I've read he played some pretty good defense as well. And since I've gone this far, I'll even throw 10 names out there:

Sammy Baugh
Bronko Nagurski
Mel Hein
Cal Hubbard
Turk Edwards
Mike Michalske
Bill Hewitt
Clarke Hinkle
Link Lyman
Guy Chamberlin

I'm not saying this is my list, like I said at the beginning, I'd probably like to see 2 or maybe three from this list - choosing just 10 players is tough.

[bachslunch]

Ken Crippen's site recently put up an entry for Bill Hewitt, and the results were less than stellar -- score was 7.5. He surprisingly has a good honors profile at 6/0/30s, showing the same kind of honors-vs-study disconnect Dick Stanfel and Dick Schafrath have. Very eye-opening.

[bachslunch]

Should also add that Ken added an entry for Wayne Millner at about the same time. Millner frequently shows up on lists for worst players in the PFHoF and sometimes is mentioned as THE worst, period. He actually graded out about the same as Hewitt (7.5), which still isn't anything to brag about.

[DukeSlater]

My list:

Lawrence Taylor

Dick Lane

Dick Butkus

Ronnie Lott

Reggie White

Merlin Olsen

Deacon Jones

Bob Lilly

Bruce Smith

Deion Sanders

Close: Ray Lewis, Joe Schmidt, Mel Blount

[TanksAndSpartans]

Ken Crippen's site recently put up an entry for Bill Hewitt, and the results were less than stellar -- score was 7.5. He surprisingly has a good honors profile at 6/0/30s, showing the same kind of honors-vs-study disconnect Dick Stanfel and Dick Schafrath have. Very eye-opening.

I appreciate what Ken is doing and I'm all for objective analysis, but I've noticed whenever there are posts about it, the sample size isn't mentioned. Hewitt played from 32-39 and had a comeback in 43 (which I assume was due to manpower shortages resulting from World War II). The games evaluated were:

December 9, 1934 <- just a newsreel of the championship game and the overall grade was N/A

November 26, 1936 Detroit Lions 7.4

October 24, 1943 New York Giants 7.5

Essentially, this comes down to two games, one of which was in 1943 the season he came out of retirement to play....

I think its fair to say the sample size is pretty small here. Is it possible Hewitt had a bad game against the Lions? Is it possible he was old (~34) and out of shape in 43? The reason I had him on my list was based on my research of Bears games during the 32, 33, and 34 seasons when newspaper writers document him being a disruptive force on defense. I'm not willing to throw that away based on film evaluation of two games both from a later time period. And I'm certainly not willing to discredit his honors or call them surprising and rate him as one of the worst HOFers - that seems like a huge jump to me.

How would Alan Page grade for SB VIII? Or Timmy Smith for SB XXII? I'm never willing to take a number at face value - I always look at the data underneath it and in my opinion number of games evaluated and what seasons those games are from are relevant.

[NWebster]

Ken Crippen's site recently put up an entry for Bill Hewitt, and the results were less than stellar -- score was 7.5. He surprisingly has a good honors profile at 6/0/30s, showing the same kind of honors-vs-study disconnect Dick Stanfel and Dick Schafrath have. Very eye-opening.

I appreciate what Ken is doing and I'm all for objective analysis, but I've noticed whenever there are posts about it, the sample size isn't mentioned. Hewitt played from 32-39 and had a comeback in 43 (which I assume was due to manpower shortages resulting from World War II). The games evaluated were:

December 9, 1934 <- just a newsreel of the championship game and the overall grade was N/A

November 26, 1936 Detroit Lions 7.4

October 24, 1943 New York Giants 7.5

Essentially, this comes down to two games, one of which was in 1943 the season he came out of retirement to play....

I think its fair to say the sample size is pretty small here. Is it possible Hewitt had a bad game against the Lions? Is it possible he was old (~34) and out of shape in 43? The reason I had him on my list was based on my research of Bears games during the 32, 33, and 34 seasons when newspaper writers document him being a disruptive force on defense. I'm not willing to throw that away based on film evaluation of two games both from a later time period. And I'm certainly not willing to discredit his honors or call them surprising and rate him as one of the worst HOFers - that seems like a huge jump to me.

How would Alan Page grade for SB VIII? Or Timmy Smith for SB XXII? I'm never willing to take a number at face value - I always look at the data underneath it and in my opinion number of games evaluated and what seasons those games are from are relevant.

Agree that anythig gets more accurate with more observations, that should be transparent. I recall that Jeff Blake had a perfect passer rating game.

[Ken Crippen]

Ken Crippen's site recently put up an entry for Bill Hewitt, and the results were less than stellar -- score was 7.5. He surprisingly has a good honors profile at 6/0/30s, showing the same kind of honors-vs-study disconnect Dick Stanfel and Dick Schafrath have. Very eye-opening.

I appreciate what Ken is doing and I'm all for objective analysis, but I've noticed whenever there are posts about it, the sample size isn't mentioned. Hewitt played from 32-39 and had a comeback in 43 (which I assume was due to manpower shortages resulting from World War II). The games evaluated were:

December 9, 1934 <- just a newsreel of the championship game and the overall grade was N/A

November 26, 1936 Detroit Lions 7.4

October 24, 1943 New York Giants 7.5

Essentially, this comes down to two games, one of which was in 1943 the season he came out of retirement to play....

I think its fair to say the sample size is pretty small here. Is it possible Hewitt had a bad game against the Lions? Is it possible he was old (~34) and out of shape in 43? The reason I had him on my list was based on my research of Bears games during the 32, 33, and 34 seasons when newspaper writers document him being a disruptive force on defense. I'm not willing to throw that away based on film evaluation of two games both from a later time period. And I'm certainly not willing to discredit his honors or call them surprising and rate him as one of the worst HOFers - that seems like a huge jump to me.

How would Alan Page grade for SB VIII? Or Timmy Smith for SB XXII? I'm never willing to take a number at face value - I always look at the data underneath it and in my opinion number of games evaluated and what seasons those games are from are relevant.

Matt and I completely agree, which is why we list the number of games reviewed with the scores. When we do rankings, ties are broken by the number of games. The more games we have, the stronger the score.

We would like to see a minimum of 20 games before we start to feel confident about the grade.

[JeffreyMiller]

Bad edit job ... sorry!

[JeffreyMiller]

This is precisely why I say you can't discount Wayne Milner as a viable HOF member. Latter day historians tend to argue that Millner made it in mainly because Sammy B championed his case. But I would argue that the voters, some of whom saw him play, and some of whom went on newspaper clippings, felt it was justified. I have read scores of articles and accounts about Swede Youngstrom, and if they are to be believed, he was the best lineman in the league for two or three years in the early 20s. Some of his contemporaries might have argued that he should be in the HOF. I am a believer in game film, as I have a fairly large library myself, and feel it is essential in evaluating performance. However, when the researcher is limited in the amount of footage at his disposal, you go to the first hand accounts of eye-witnesses and newspapers. But relying too heavily on newspapers is risky too, as hometown papers tended to hyperbolize or be downright wrong. I've stated in a previous post that the city of Buffalo had six daily newspapers in the early 1920s, and sometimes you got three different accounts of the same play (a 20-yard touchdown could be from a lateral, a forward, or a run ...). But the one thing they had in common was their tendency to state the hometown players as the best, most exciting, biggest draw, etc ...