Spec or Speck Sanders? It's Both. Runner or Passer? It's Both.

 By John Turney 

What was it Spec or Speck Sanders?

It's both.

Orban Eugene Sanders was nicknamed "Speck" due to being a freckled lad. 

The name stuck. Kind of.

Later in life he signed autographs "Speck" Sanders. He named his drying cleaning business in Lawton Oklahoma the "Speck Sanders Drive-In Cleaners" and is still in business to this day.

But in the middle and even now he's also referred to as "Spec", without the "k". 

In the middle of his life, as a pro football player, the names were interchangeable in newspapers but it does seem like the New York papers mostly used Spec.

Sanders was an Oklahoma high school star who got his start in college ball Cameron Junior College in Lawton where he also starred (Later he was inducted into the Junior College  Hall of Fame).

From there he transferred to the University of Texas, though he wanted to go to the University of Oklahoma, and again he played well but was not the big man on campus as he had been. However, he did catch the attention of the Washington Redskins who took him in the first round of the 1942 NFL draft.

However, duty called and Sanders entered the U.S. Navy. He spent his time as an athletic instructor, including one year on New Hebrides in the Pacific Theater in 1944. But prior to that found time to play football for the Georgia Pre-Flight Skycrackers and the year after that played service ball with the North Carolina Pre-Flight Cloudbusters whose quarterback was Otto Graham.

After the War ended Sanders finished his degree at Austin in the Fall of 1945 and in the Summer of 1946 he signed with the New York Yankees in the new All-America Football Conference (AAFC). 

What was Spec Sanders a running back or a quarterback?

It's both.

He was a tailback in a single-wing offense, one that the tailback took the ball on the snap and who could run it, hand it off or pass it, and even punt it.

At that position, he did things no one did before or since in pro football. 

In his first season he recorded the only 700-yard rushing, 200-yard receiving and 400-yard passing season in NFL/AAFC history. His 706 rushing yards led the league and six rushing touchdowns tied for the lead. It was good enough for a 10-3-1 record and a shot at the league title, though the Yankees fell short, losing to the Cleveland Browns.

The next year, though, is really one for the books. He rushed for 1,432 yards, again leading the AAFC but also threw for 1,442 yards - the only 1,400-1,400 yard season in NFL/AAFC annals.

Again the team rivaled the Browns going 11-2-1 but losing in the AAFC championship game to Otto Graham's Browns for the second year in a row. He was again All-AAFC that remarkable year. There was no MVP award but had there been one, Sanders would have been it.

The Yankees slipped some in 1948, Sanders rushed for 759 yards and passed for 918 yards and accounted for 14 touchdowns but the team went just 6-8.

He sat out the 1949 season to have a knee operation. 

The NFL absorbed the AAFC with only a few teams taken into the NFL fold. The players were divided up among the NFL teams some of them in an odd free-agent draft pool that occurred in June of 1950. In it Sanders was drafted by the New York Yanks, a remnant of the New York Bulldogs a 1949 NFL expansion team that, in part, merged with the AAFC New York Yankees. 

In the preseason Sanders played halfback - the Yanks ran a T-formation offense - but he ended up playing safety the centerfielder in what one newspaper called the New York Yanks defensive "outfield".

That year, his only one in the NFL, he led the league with 13 interceptions, setting the NFL record (broken two years later by Night Train Lane), made the New York Daily News All-Pro team and the Pro Bowl. 

And that was it for Sanders and football. He'd signed a one-year contract with the Yanks and chose to not return. He turned down an offer from Paul Brown to play in Cleveland in 1951. 

Sanders was really the last star of the single-wing in pro football the last in a line of players like Dutch Clark, Arnie Herber, Ace Parker and others. By 1950 the end of his career the wing was barely used, though some teams still used some forms of it but they were the exception, not the rule.

Still, he is only one of four players to have 1,000-yard rushing and 1,000-yard passing in the same season. The others?  Lamar Jackson, Michael Vick and Justin Fields.

And Sanders did it in 14 games. In 1947.

Nineteen forty-seven.  

That's a player worth remembering.