re: Who is the best player from your school, and would they be your starter today?

Paul Skenes, no doubt YES.
Geaux Tigers!

Joe Burrow, no doubt YES.
Geaux Jeaux!

No disrespect to LSU’s current starters!
Let’s geaux!!

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About like you seen to believe it’s irrelevant.

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I have repeatedly listed the size of some former players to show they weren’t all midgets as you seem to believe. Clearly size matters to some degree.

A player has to be big enough and strong enough to play some positions, and fast enough and quick enough to play others. But size is not directly proportionate to skill.

Which of these starting NFL defensive ends was better last season?

Player A: 6’4” and 270 pounds
Player B: 6’5” and 285 pounds

Player B right? He is the bigger guy right?

No, player A led the NFL with 17.5 sacks in 17 games while player B had 5 sacks in 17 games. Their other state such as tackles, FF, were all similar. But not sacks. In fact, there were a LOT of defensive ends who were bigger than the guy who led the league in the stat they are really judged on. Maybe, just maybe, there is a little more to it than just size.

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Maybe, just maybe, there is a little more to it than just size.

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Like speed, strength, and coaching. And who do you think that favors?

The best college teams in the ‘70s mostly ran and defended the wishbone with wide receivers in three point stances. There would be quite a bit of shock if you put a player from the ‘70s in a DeLorean and sent him to 2025 to start immediately in the modern game.

I am not saying no one from the ‘70s could play today, but they would be rare. Overall, I think the game has evolved so much that modern college teams could beat NFL teams from the ‘70s.

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The best college teams in the ‘70s mostly ran and defended the wishbone with wide receivers in three point stances. There would be quite a bit of shock if you put a player from the ‘70s in a DeLorean and sent him to 2025 to start immediately in the modern game.

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College football is cyclical. I am not saying that teams are going to go back to running the wishbone. But if a team with a top 20 roster suited for it did they would cause all kinds of problems for teams for a year or two. And then defenses would start figuring out how to stop them.

A few years ago football was all about spread offenses. Until Georgia and Michigan won national championships. And that caused some coaches to go back in time and put more of an emphasis on defense and a string running game. If the trend continues, more teams will revert back. Then someone will develop a new wrinkle on offense that takes defenses a few years to adjust to and other coaches will copy it. Then defenses will adjust, and the cycle will start over. It is the Gus Malzhan effect. An average coach who thinks outside the box and throws things other coaches have never seen before will have tremendous success for a few years. Then others figure out how to stop them. Then, that coach will adjust and come up with a new wrinkle or gimmick. Or they will become a perennial 8-4/7-5 coach.

If you sent a 2025 wr to another team in 2025 and asked him to start immediately with no clue about the playbook they would be in for a shock too. If you put Fred Blietnikoff, Lynn Swann, Steve Largent, or John Stallworth in that Delorean in January so they could have a year of preparation like other players, come football season they would terrorize modern defenses.

Good players are good players, regardless. Take Julio Jones for example. Everyone knew he was great from watching him. But if someone just looked at his end of the year stats, they wouldn’t see anything that special. As a three year starter he averaged less than 1,000 yards per seasons. He started 40 games and averaged only 66 yards per game. That was just the offense he was in. At that time, Alabama was by far the most dominant program in football. Had he played for Texas Tech, Hawaii, or a number of other pass centric teams his stats would have jumped off the page. But he wouldn’t have been a better player. Just like some of those guys from the 70s weren’t horrible just because their stats didn’t jump off the page like in today’s offense centric game of football.

You seem to think people are drastically different today than they were in 1975. They aren’t.

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If you sent a 2025 wr to another team in 2025 and asked him to start immediately with no clue about the playbook they would be in for a shock too.

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When I say start immediately, I don’t mean show up on game day. A player transferring from Georgia to Ohio State will acclimate much faster than someone from the 1975 game. Obviously.

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. You seem to think people are drastically different today than they were in 1975. They aren’t.

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Yes, they are. Otherwise, the OP’s question wouldn’t make any sense. How can you not be a starter if you’re the program’s absolute “best player”?

Football players in 1975 competed against a smaller population in a world in which black athletes were not given the same opportunities as today. 1975 is only six years removed from the last all white national champion in 1969 and four years from Alabama’s first black player in 1971.

Smaller population, fewer opportunities for that population, fewer recruiting resources, far less development through high school and college, and primitive schemes and techniques = getting smoked. Some stars of that era probably wouldn’t have been stars if recruiting in the ‘60s and ‘70s were like today. No doubt more talent slipped through the cracks 50 years ago than it does today due to a lack of exposure or even racism. Bear Bryant frankly told Condredge Holloway he didn’t think Alabama was ready for a black quarterback.

So there are a lot of factors affecting the talent level other than a few years in the weight room.

Could an All-American from 1975 be a starter today if born 20 years ago? Probably most of them, yes. But show up “as is” for spring training in a time machine with a few months to prepare for a modern season and be dominant? Probably not too many in that case.

We just look at things differently.

People are NOT drastically different than they were 50 years ago. We just have access to more technology. Humans adapt incredibly quickly. They evolve incredibly slowly. If you took a high quality player from 1975, let’s just say all conference not even all american, and put him on a 2025 team as a freshmen, he would be indistinguishable from other “modern” freshmen. When he was a junior, he would be indistinguishable from “modern” juniors. And he would be a star player now. Just like he was in 1975.

You make it sound like people from 50 years ago are genetically different than we are today. It just isn’t true.

Did more players fall through the cracks back then? Sure. For a whole myriad of reasons, not just racism. If anything, after desegregation most coaches went out specifically looking to sign all these black players they had been unable to sign before.

Football and football recruiting then were nothing like they are today. Today, most kids want to be rich and famous. Being a professional footnall player is one of the ways they see to do that. In 1975, that wasn’t the case. In 1975 Joe Namath signed a 2 year $900,000 contract. That was the biggest contract in NFL history. That $450,000/year is equivalent to $2.7 million today. For 2025 the top five paid QB’s average annual salary is $43.4 million a year. The total contract values (three are 5 years, one is 6, one is 10) is $1.6 billion. Now with NIL, they can get paid a LOT of money to play football even sooner. That wasn’t the case in 1975. A lot of people who would have been tremendous players simply didn’t play. Today, many of them likely would.

There is an old story, supposedly true, about Bear Bryant out recruiting in the 60s. He got lost and stopped to ask for directions from a young man working a plow behind a mule. After the kid, a local highschooler, had given Bear directions he pointed in the direction he needed to go. Only instead of pointing with his finger he picked up the plow and pointed with it. Bear Bryant asked him if he wanted to play football at Alabama. My point being, a lot of potential stars didn’t play, and some that did were overlooked because there was no such thing as modern recruiting services back then.

Yes, there is more competition today and simply more people. But if you took the top 25% of starting players from 1975 and put them on a 2025 roster as a freshmen, they would almost all start during their career. You have made the argument they wouldn’t even be competitive.

So again, you can say people today are so much more superior to people only 50 years ago. But they aren’t. At the core, they are the same.

I'd take a prime JFF, Von Miller, or Myles Garrett any day.

Yeah, Derrick Thomas was a freak of nature, and though Bennett was a great player, Thomas was on another level.

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Earl Campbell and hell yes he would.

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Many years ago a buddy of mine was head of juvenile probation in my county. His counterpart in Tyler at the time was Earls sister. He said she was built like Earl with the lower body and huge thighs and probably could have made a college team.

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Many years ago a buddy of mine was head of juvenile probation in my county. His counterpart in Tyler at the time was Earls sister. He said she was built like Earl with the lower body and huge thighs and probably could have made a college team.

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haha yeah probably true