Favre ranks best among the best
Brilliance, durability put Favre on top
How would you sift through 100 years of Green Bay Packers football to go about ranking the best 100 players in their history? We gave it a shot.
How would you sift through 100 years of Green Bay Packers football to go about ranking the best 100 players in their history? How can you compare players in the first 20 years of the franchise, an era of two-way players who engaged in low-scoring battles of field position, with players of the more wide open and specialized game of the 1980s, ’90s and 2000s? And how do you compare players from the Lombardi glory years of the 1960s with the behemoths and speedsters of the last two decades? Those are some of the tough questions we took on when we decided to rank the top 100 players in the history of one of the NFL’s iconic franchises in a league that is celebrating its 100th season this year.
We decided on only the most basic guidelines: Rankings should be based strictly on performance on the field and only on the Packers portion of the player’s career. Good citizenship and achievements for other teams were not a factor.
Other than that, it’s basically beauty, eye and beholder. The game has changed drastically over 100 years, so it meant trying to figure out who were the best players relative to the competition at the time they played.
This isn’t baseball, where stats usually tell a huge part of the story. This was mostly art and not much science.
We also consulted two invaluable sources to help with the project: the Packers’ official historian, Cliff Christl, and former general manager Ron Wolf.
Christl has as deep a knowledge of franchise history as anyone who’s ever lived. He grew up in Green Bay from the mid-1940s through mid-’60s; covered the team for the Press-Gazette or Milwaukee Journal Sentinel from the early 1970s through the early 2010s; estimates having conducted 150 or more oral-history interviews with Packers players, coaches and executives, going back to members of Packers teams from the mid-1930s; and has read every Press-Gazette sports section from 1919 through 1962, and either the Milwaukee Journal or Milwaukee Sentinel sports section for every day from 1919-1950.
Wolf is a Pro Football Hall of Fame GM who has been
engrossed in the NFL since his childhood in Pennsylvania (he was born in 1938). Besides his accomplishments as a personnel evaluator in the AFL and NFL from the early 1960s through his retirement from the Packers in 2001, he is something of a football historian himself and often serves as an adviser to the Pro Football Hall of Fame seniors committee.
We relied heavily on their advice over numerous consultations.
Starting at the top, the big question was whether the best player in Packers history is Brett Favre, Aaron Rodgers or Don Hutson? Or, for that matter, lesserknown Clarke Hinkle?
In end, we went with Favre, followed by Rodgers, Hutson and Hinkle in that order.
The first two won out because of quarterbacks’ outsized impact in today’s NFL, and the quality of play they brought to the position. They are inarguably the primary reason the Packers have the NFL’s third-highest winning percentage (.620) since 1992 and have won five league MVPs combined. Favre won the top spot because of his incredible durability (253 straight starts) and longevity (16 years). Rodgers, 35, still has time to change that assessment.
Hutson, while also a true all-time great, ranks just below them in part because he had three of his best seasons (1942, ’43 and ’44) when the league’s talent base was depleted during World War II.
Still, Hutson gets the nod over his former teammate Hinkle at No. 3. The underappreciated Hinkle was the greater all-around player — he was a star on both sides of the ball, while Hutson was a liability on defense as an undersized end. But Hutson was a big-play machine and trail blazer who changed the twoway “end” into a receiver-oriented position. He also scored 102 touchdowns in 11 seasons to Hinkle’s 44 in 10 seasons.
“I’m not sure (Hutson) didn’t revolutionize the game more than he dominated it,” Christl said.
Putting together this list required making a lot of tough calls and splitting plenty of hairs. A few decisions warrant a quick explanation:
Some might be surprised at Paul Hornung’s high ranking (No. 6 overall) because of his relatively pedestrian rushing stats. He never finished higher than No. 7 in the NFL in rushing for a season and never rushed for more than 681 yards in a season. His rushing stats are nowhere near teammate Jim Taylor’s.
But stats in this case simply don’t tell the story. Lombardi’s offense revolved around the dual threat Hornung provided as a runner and passer on the famous Lombardi sweep. Hornung’s left halfback position as it was defined in Lombardi’s
offense doesn’t exist in today’s game. Hornung also was an outstanding receiver and a prolific scorer early in his career in his dual role as a kicker.
“Everyone I knew connected with those great Packers teams said Paul Hornung was the best player (of the Lombardi era),” Wolf said.
We’re sure many Bart Starr fans will be incredulous he ranks No. 11 — some probably think he should be No. 1. He certainly is the most popular player in team history.
Starr surely was the ultimate field general (toughness, poise, play-calling acumen, passing accuracy) for a dynasty that won five titles in seven years. But he played for a peerless coach, was surrounded by a bounty of Hall of Fame talent on both sides of the ball and played in an era when the NFL was still a running league. He also had physical limitations in arm strength and as a scrambler.
It’s worth remembering that long-forgotten quarterbacks Billy Wade and Frank Ryan won titles in the two years Starr didn’t from 1961-67.
When it comes down to separating the best of the best in team history, these things matter. Starr was among the franchise’s all-time greats, but we concluded the players above him were greater for their eras.
Verne Lewellen (No. 5), Gale Gillingham (No. 21) and Cecil Isbell (No. 24) are not in the Pro Football Hall of Fame, yet they rank higher than some or many Packers who are in the Hall.
Lewellen is one of the NFL’s forgotten greats and an egregious Hall of Fame omission. He was the best player on the Packers’ championship teams of 1929, ’30 and ’31, and as a player from the founding era (he played from 1924-32) missed his chance when the Hall overlooked him in its first two classes (1963 and ’64). He might have a chance this year because the Hall is planning to include 10 seniors candidates in an expanded class to celebrate the league’s 100th season.
As for Gillingham, Wolf says the former Packers coaches and scouts he has talked to over the years rate Hall of Famer Mike Michalske (1927-37) and Gillingham as the two greatest guards in Packers history.
Isbell played only five years (193842), but they were brilliant years, perhaps behind only Gale Sayers for the best short career in NFL history. The legendary Sammy Baugh entered the NFL one year earlier than Isbell, and in the five years they both played in the league, Isbell threw for more touchdowns (61 to 49), more yards (5,945 to 5,498) and had a higher passer rating (72.6 to 66.8), plus was the far superior runner (1,522 yards compared to Baugh’s 172).
Former Bears coach George Halas said after Isbell’s rookie year that Isbell was better than Arnie Herber, the Hall of Fame halfback Isbell replaced in 1938.
Among the greatest difficulties was separating players who had shorter but very productive careers with the Packers from those who played longer but at a lesser impact. Along with Isbell, Sterling Sharpe was particularly tough to place. He was great (four seasons of 90 or more catches) in an era when receivers stats started exploding, but his career lasted only seven years. Wolf thinks Sharpe should be in the Hall of Fame. We decided that Sharpe’s place (25) should be just behind Isbell’s.
Another player, Reggie White (No. 9), arguably ranks as the second-best defensive player in the history of the game, but as great as his six seasons with the Packers were, they came when he already was past his prime.
Farther down the list, longevity also gave Donald Driver (No. 64) the nod over Dorsey Levens (No. 66), even though Levens was a key player in the Packers’ Super Bowl seasons of 1996 and ’97.
Short service with the franchise made it especially difficult to rate players such as Ted Hendricks and Emlen Tunnell. It was a really tough call, but we found a spot for Hendricks, an outside linebacker, at the bottom of the list (99) because though he played only one season (1974) with the Packers, it might have been the single best season (five interceptions, seven blocked kicks) by a defensive player in team history.
Tunell, a cornerback, finished his Hall of Fame career as a leader in Lombardi’s locker room and had five interceptions in three seasons. He finished at No. 101.
Others who didn’t quite make the cut were Frank Winters, Bob Brown, Julius Peppers, Earl Dotson, Santana Dotson and Eddie Lee Ivery.
Three current players made the list (Rodgers at No. 2, David Bakhtiari at No. 65 and Davante Adams at No. 76). Their rankings could change, perhaps significantly, in the coming years.