Calvin Hill Career Stats Including WFL

 By John Turney

Here are Calvin Hill's rushing and receiving stats including his season with The Hawaiians in the World Football League—

 

Colorization of the Day—1946 AAFC Champions

By John Turney

Otto Graham, Mac Speedie, Paul Brown, Dane Lavelli in the locker room after the title win in 1946.

 

Review—Majesty and Mayhem: Pro Football of the 1980s—by Tom Danyluk

By John Turney

  

This book is worth the money, as author Tom Danyluk's books usually are. It is available at Amazon for about $22. 

It contains 45 chapters, mostly shorter ones, and features the Fog Bowl, Eric Dickerson, Ronnie Lott, Doug Williams, and on and on. It also has a nice chapter on Paul "Dr. Z" Zimmerman and a section that rates the champions of the 1980s and two chapters of nothing but notable quotes and is illustrated with lots of black and white photographs.

This book ranks up there with Danyluk's book The Super 70s comprehensive treatise on football in that decade as a collection of essays and photos that examines the 1980s but not as dry timeline fashion but an era's top teams, players, and games." 

It is not just full of stories about stars (one chapter is about Leon Bright) or triumphs (one chapter as about Chuck Muncie) which gives it more of a flavor of an era that was full of good things but stared down drug usage, PEDs, strikes, and other growing pains and emerged more popular than ever at the end of the decade.

This is an easy "recommend". 

via Amazon—

"About Tom Danyluk

Tom has been a pro football writer for over 30 years, starting at The Pitt News - the University of Pittsburgh's student newspaper - where he won the schools' first Outstanding Sports Columnist Award. He has been a member of the Pro Football Writers Assocation since 1987.

Tom joined Pro Football Weekly in 2004, where he was a feature columnist through 2013. At Pro Football Weekly, he won several PFWA writing awards, including "Best Column," the most coveted of the awards (2009)."

Cooper Kupp by Bruce Tatman

 By John Turney 

Cooper Kupp by Bruce Tatman

Back in the day, the NFL commissioned Merv Corning to do a watercolor of the MVP of the Super Bowl. That ended in 1998 and Corning passed away in 2006 so it could never have been revived. So, for over twenty years we've not had the opportunity to see an awesome watercolor of a Super Bowl MVP like this one of Cooper Kupp.

Bruce Tatman, just an amazing artist, did this piece recently. We've proposed that the NFL hire him to do such commissioned pieces. He does not try to be Corning, he's got his own style but the NFL lacks because there are no longer artists such as Corning, Chuck Ren, George Bartell, Bart Forbes, Cliff Spohn, and others. 

The fans are not able to appreciate the stimulation right side of their brains because these kinds of works of art are not snapped up by the NFL and used in programs and books or other media. 

We supposed they younger fans are too busy working the numbers of fantasy football and stimulating their left brains . . . which is too bad. Both are needed, left- and right brain usage.

We've suggested this before to the NFL marketing group but to no avail. We will do the same again in another email and also stage them on Twitter but we don't expect and consideration of the proposal to once again incorporate the fine arts into the palette of images seen by fans—they can still use digital art and photos, of course—so fans can appreciate what previous fans enjoyed.

Here are a few of Corning's Super Bowl MVPs—

Elbert Dubenion—Deep Ball Record-Holder

By John Turney

Elbert Dubenion still holds the record for highest yards per catch for players with 40 or more catches at 27.1—a mark that ma never been broken. 

Flipper Anderson averaged 26.0 on 44 grabs in 1989 but it is really something of a relic, a pure deep threat. 

Chart credit: Pro Football Reference

26.8 yards per catch in 1969

Fourth on the list, 25.9 average in 1976

We used to love these guys, 25-yards a catch, 22.0 yards a catch, anything over twenty was impressive. It's just one of those things that are gone forever. The closest we've had recently is DeSean Jackson, really. 

Sure, today's players could do it but they catch way too many short passes and with coverages as they are teams pay a premium to stop the long passes to give up some yards on short passes.

So, here's to Golden Wheels Dubinion—The best of an extinct player—The Deep Threat. And mentions to Harlon Hill, Bob Hayes, Paul Warfield, Homer Jones and so many more. 

What fun they were. 

A Coach Traded for a Player, Kind Of

 By John Turney 

Jim David

In the Spring of 1960, the Rams traded for Pro Bowl defensive back Jim David and gave up Sam Williams for him.

The thing is Bob Waterfield said that David was brought to Los Angeles to be the defensive backs coach. When pushed he said "David would never play and that David was too busy to be a player-coach.

So it was Sam Williams for a secondary coach.

Williams was expendable because the Rams were deep at defensive end. They had Gene Brito returning from an injury, Lamar Lundy who played left end in Brito's place. At the right end they had Lou Michaels and as a third end John Baker. And in 1959 they had Williams who played some but mostly on special teams—he blocked a punt that went for a safety.

So, in 1960 they had their four defensive ends and added rookie John Kenerson ostensibly to replace  Williams who went on to be a starter in Detroit and also was a starter for the expansion Falcons in 1966 and 1967.

Waterfield treaded for David when he had Tom Fears as an offensive coach and as the following article said some felt David was "a villain" because he broke Fears' leg several sessions previous—David was known as "The Hatchet" so he had a reputation already as a hard-hitter. 

He went on to coach the Rams d-backs for three years, until Waterfield was fired. Then he went to the 49ers in the same capacity. When his former teammate Joe Schmidt got the head coaching job in Detroit in 1967 he hired David to run the defense, a position he held through 1972 when Don McCafferty replaced Schmidt as the head coach.

With the Lions he coached Lem Barney, Dick LeBeau, Mike Weger, and for one season future NFL head coach Dick Jauron.

Here are the clips—

A Few Thoughts on The Hall of Fame

 By Nick Webster 

1.  So frequently we have debates on who should go in, who’s left out, who should be first-ballot; but we rarely reverse the exercise. Suppose you’re a ‘small Hall’ guy, who would you take out that you don’t think belongs. Or even if you’re not a ‘small Hall’ guy, if forced to, who would you remove that would do the least harm to the Hall?  

A few approaches can apply, who do you come up with?

    a.  Remove one player per position

    b.  Remove one player per team

    c.  Remove one player per HOF class

    d.  Remove the bottom X number of players - we’ll go with 10

2.  So much talk among real Hall fans is about the Senior Pool. Should it be the recently overlooked, should it be ‘super Seniors’ e.g.: two-way players, etc. A thought, what if every year the Senior pool rotated through decades, or clusters of decades. It’s always been problematic to compare Jim Benton to Drew Pearson, but what if in year one we were selecting from a pool of players from the ’30s, year-two the 40s, year-three the 50s, and so on. 

Jim Benton

This would make player comparisons easier, you could have different panels of experts with relatively more insight on the era and it would ensure, over time, broad generational representation.  What one player would you select from each decade?

3.  Some nerdiness. Should the bar for the Hall of Fame be lower or higher? Thinking about it mathematically, the Hall is supposed to represent the best of the best. 

What if players are normally distributed on a bell curve the average player (say an alright starter) is right in the middle, a terrible player (the next guy you cut when you can find a replacement - say Falcons QB Kim McQuilken - look him up if you don’t know him) is on the left tail, and a Hall of Famer should be on the right tail. 

 If you buy the general assumption that, like most everything in the world, players are distributed in a ‘normal distribution’ on the bell curve then any lowering of the bar lets in more players than a raising of the bar removes. If you move the line between the orange and blue sections a notch left (lowering the bar) you let in more players than if you move it the same distance to the right. In such a way lowering the bar only inspires more debate about other worthy players than raising the bar.

    a.  A simple concrete example. Suppose you set the RB bar based on Career Yards-per-game and started with requiring a 1000-yard season with a 12-game schedule, you’d let in everyone over 83.3 yards-per-game, or 8 currently retired RBs. But if you raised that five yards-per-game to 88.3 you’d only have four currently retired RBs whereas lowering it to 78.3 yards-per-game nets you 16 retired RBs.

    b.   I for one, am not for lowering the bar— 

4.  Finally, we occasionally hear people emphasize that it is the Pro Football Hall of Fame not the NFL Hall of Fame in various contexts. But, not having been in the room, who are players who crossed the Hall of Fame threshold based on Professional performance not in the NFL or its predecessors (AFL, AAFC—yes I’m counting it)?  Jim Thorpe seems a fairly obvious selection; but scratch your head to think of who is in based on NFL plus CFL performance, NFL plus USFL performance, NFL plus WFL performance.  

Arnie Weinmeister

Possibly Arnie Weinmeister, though we believe his selection was based on his short-but-spectacular AAFC and NFL play. For both the USFL and WFL there’s a fairly good argument that the level of play was notably lower and the leagues were short-lived, so it’s difficult for accrued performance to meaningfully impact your view of a player; so apparently, no love for Herschel Walker.