List your "greatest player in every league"!

[JameisLoseston]

Basically, list one player for every pro football league that has existed, you can name as many leagues as you want. Only accomplishments that occurred in the league of interest count; for instance, Kurt Warner isn't the greatest Arena Football player for what he went on to do in the NFL. Hopefully this won't devolve into a Manning-Brady argument. Here's my guys:

NFL: Jerry Rice
AFL: Lance Alworth
AAFC: Spec Sanders
USFL: Herschel Walker
WFL: Ed Marshall
CFL: Doug Flutie
Arena: Tom Grady (LOL)
AAF: Trent Richardson
XFL 1.0: Tommy Maddox

Can you guys pull up some even more obscure leagues and names? Pre-NFL?

[Rupert Patrick]

Does APFA count?

[JameisLoseston]

Does APFA count?

Well, it is the NFL, but no other reason you can't list a player from it if you want.

[TanksAndSpartans]

I hope someone has time to add some more leagues - I know we have some folks on here who have done research on a lot of different leagues. I'd like to add:

Ohio League: Jim Thorpe
Anthracite League: Tony Latone
First AFL: Eddie Tryon
PCFL: Kenny Washington

And one mentioned league I have an opinion on is:

AAFC: Otto Graham, Marion Motley

[sheajets]

Greatest football player I personally ever saw was Barry Sanders

[ChrisBabcock]

Greatest football player I personally ever saw was Barry Sanders

Same here.
At this game...

https://www.pro-football-reference.com/ ... 220buf.htm

[Rupert Patrick]

Greatest football player I personally ever saw was Barry Sanders

Same here.
At this game...

https://www.pro-football-reference.com/ ... 220buf.htm

I don't really like to go to football games; I just don't like large crowds, and it's so much easier to see everything on TV. I've probably been to about a dozen NFL games in my life. But I did see Barry play once, in this game:

https://www.pro-football-reference.com/ ... 040det.htm

This was a MNF game and is was quite infamous in the Detroit area because there were several dozen fistfights (I saw at least 10 from where I was in the upper deck) going on in the stands between drunken Bears fans and drunken Lions fans in the fourth quarter, despite the fact they cut off beer sales at halftime, they had been tailgating outside the Silverdome for about five hours before the game started. The ABC camera crews skipped all the brouhaha going on in the stands, but the local news cameras were all over it and we got to see it all. I remember a person leaving the game died outside the stadium, I think he was so drunk he fell over and hit his head on a concrete curb and because of his severe drunkedness there wasn't much they could do to medically treat him. The Lions put in all new sorts of rules to curtail excessive tailgating in the parking lot and to not allow anybody inside who they felt was overly drunk.

[TanksAndSpartans]

From an atmosphere point of view, I prefer college games esp. in smallish venues. Going to a game is a big investment - the travel time is completely lost and if I just watch on TV I can usually get other stuff done.

[Reaser]

WLAF/NFLE is a tough one by nature of the league. One because there was the first incarnation then it returned after a two year hiatus and secondly because after it came back, by the year the rosters were more put together by allocations until for all intents and purposes the entire league talent pool was allocated which meant less players playing in the league longer than one season. Still was multi-year players, the international players of course (Marco Martos, Scott Couper, etc), Scott McCready and also guys like Mario Bailey and Skyler Fulton (who I played against in youth football and in a HS jamboree). Kenny McEntyre had a good run with the Monarchs but he's more remembered as an Arena player.

Would be tough to pick a best ever player, especially since most just tie their NFL career to it (e.g. Kurt Warner), you can start with the first MVP Stan Gelbaugh but then year 2 he had a disaster season and was replaced by the original Air McNair. Then it's a bunch of one year guys, David Archer, Jon Kitna, Lawrence Phillips, Danny Wuerffel and so on.

Even though he didn't get league MVP (T.J. Rubley) I'd say Kitna's one season and Phillips' one season were the best individual seasons. I'd probably go with Mario Bailey as the best player who played multiple years. No bias, even though Kitna and Bailey both played HS and college football here in The Great State of Washington.

[JameisLoseston]

Great thinking on WLAF/NFLE; I forgot that league existed for a moment. It's really hard to pick a QB as best, because there was really a lot of solid QB play in that league; I'd say Kitna's is outside the top five seasons. I definitely agree with Lawrence Phillips, though; truly the Trent Richardson of his era, indeed! One you missed: Touchdown Eddie Brown, who also would have been just as good a pick for Arena as Grady, also had a big one early on in WLAF, and given that I know full well he's the better player, I'm inclined to pick him over Phillips. But it's very close.