Who's the 2nd-greatest NFL WR ever?

Rice was not just the best WR ever, he might have been the best football player ever, at any position.

Comparing his YPC to other guys is off, b/c most WRs had higher averages in the '70s.

Also, yes, Rice did play in one of the best offenses ever. He was one of the main reasons it was one of the best offenses ever.

And he ruled in Super Tecmo.
 
I do not deny the greatness of Rice, but he spent a lot of time on good teams with 2 HoF qb's. Still not taking anything away from him, but I think stats = Rice, talent = Moss
 
I really have to laugh that Texas Jack is calling other people lobotomized.

The fact that Jerry Rice played 20 seasons in the NFL is a TESTAMENT to him, not a DETRIMENT to be used against him OH he's not that good, just played 60 more games than anyone else.

Also, the fact that he was on a great offense for 16 years, well, jeez, ya think maybe part of the reason they were great was, hmm, maybe JERRY RICE?

And TD/rec and yards/rec are reflective, but not "the end all" stats of WR dominance. ****, Mike Vrabel has a TD/rec ratio of 1.00, I guess he's the best ever. Paul Warfield averaged 20.1 yards/rec, why hasn't his name came up? Alvin Harper had higher yards/rec than Michael Irvin, who was better?
 
Simply showing up doesn't yield statistics like those. Besides, you admitted to them having a great offense that was pass happy. He was playing with guys like John Taylor, Roger Craig and Brent Jones who all deserved to have the ball thrown their way (and they did. It was very frequent that each of those players would catch up to 40 passes per person. That's about 10% of the ATTEMPTS per year, let alone 12% of the catches.

Later in his career, he also had to share the ball with a young Terrell Owens and yet he was still pulling in 65+ catches for 850+ yards each season (sans 1997 when he was hurt for nearly a whole season).

It wasn't like he was playing in a deep passing offense with a bunch of scrubs for a supporting cast. He was playing in a short passing offense with other good-to-great skill players. Getting 15+ ypc in that kind of a system with those kinds of players on a yearly basis is a very difficult thing to do, yet he did it anyways. He wasn't one of those guys like Bob Hayes that could MAYBE catch a 50+ yard pass. He was a guy that could always be relied on to make a catch and take a quick slant 15+ yards on any given play.

Playing in a passing offense doesn't inflate a WR's stats. It only inflates a QB's stats. When a QB throws more passes, he has to throw them to more people because defenses have to pay more attention to the biggest pass catching threat.

You do state "facts" but you want to twist them into making an assertion that he wasn't the best WR. That's still an opinion. The "facts" you posted do nothing to disprove anything we've said. Besides, you haven't even stated who you think is #1, so this looks like a bias.

In reply to:
Click to expand...
 
Hutson's numbers

Scroll down and look at his leaderboard appearances -- not only was he leading the league in yards just about every year, he was also leading it in catches.

And if you click on the individual years, you'll see that #2 in the league wasn't even close to him in a bunch of those years.
 
Warfield's an interesting candidate because he ranks 2nd on this list, and #1 is there because of kickoff returns.

I remember seeing Warfield play in the 70's and he wasn't just a deep threat receiver.

I always thought the Dolphins didn't throw him the ball enough.
 
Billy "White Shoes" Johnson

But seriously, it has to be Warfield. He never had a Montana, or Young throwing to him in Cleavland and then he went to a team that predominantly ran the ball in Miami. A Warfield in today's game would put up some sick numbers.
 
Rice was the greatest in college football history too.

What Rice did is hard to believe. He helped create 2 HoF QBs. Rice just made his team better because he was UNSTOPABLE. I've never seen a WR so unstopable at his prime than him. Moss, TO, etc can get shut down, Rice wasn't.
 
Hutson dominated the position during his playing days more than Rice dominated it during his.

So Hutson is #1 on my list.

You can only compare against a player's peers. Everything else is arguable.

Rice played in a pass happy offense. Hutson was a novelty. Pass defenses were more complex in Rice's day. Defenders could mug a receiver while the ball was in the air in Hutson's day.

For every comparison in favor of Rice's era there's one in favor of Hutson's.
 
Jerry Rice's numbers were a product of his place and time. So were Hutson's. What would either have done in the other's era and with the other's team? Who knows? Probably they'd both have still put up better numbers than anyone else.

The problem with football in general for arguments like this is that the statistics are so far more skewed than they are in baseball.

Rice (as well as Montana) benefited greatly by playing for Bill Walsh when he was the first to really build an offense around the huge rules changes that occurred before their 80's heyday. If they'd tried to run the same exact offense with the same exact players in the 70's against, say, the Steelers, they would have gotten their hats handed to them. Limiting the contact on receivers, allowing the use of hands for OL, all these were huge changes that allowed the timing passes the Niners made famous. Without those rules, about 2/3rds of Rice's slant patterns would have sailed incomplete because he would have been knocked off his route by multiple defenders before he got there - and Mean Joe Greene would have run right over Randy Cross's leg-whip to bury Joe Montana on his 3-step drop... And because the Niners were the first to embrace that offensive system, every defense they played had been built to stop something completely different. Once a certain number of teams around the league had adopted substantial parts of that offense, defenses were built to stop it, and you had those years where Fritz Shurmur's defense made the 49er's look pretty foolish.

So basically, a lot of the advantages that Hutson enjoyed as a receiver in the most pass-happy offense of his time, Rice also enjoyed playing in the West Coast offense. So Hutson led the league in long passes, Rice led the league in 2-yard TD passes because the Niners were not going to run it in from there...

And, since everybody's jumped on this Paul Warfield thing - he played in run-heavy offenses his entire career. Having watched him play, I believe he would have been every bit as good as Jerry Rice in the 80's SF offense. That's strictly opinion, of course, based only on watching (and rooting against) him... I also think Lofton was better than Rice in his prime.

Another name I'd throw out there, without any great stats to back it up - Otis Taylor.
 
I love how two primary points about how the NFL game used to be played seemed to be ignored by many of the experts on this thread.

Go back and compare the number of times the ball was thrown in the 50's, 60's, 70's and even some of the teams in the 80's compared to the Niners. Hard to catch the ball when teams don't throw it.

As for the limited coverage that is true, but also consider a couple of other factors that made throwing the ball much more difficult.

How about the rules for pass blocker in the 50's when an offensive lineman basically had to keep his hands into his chest versus today's sumo wrestling techinques? How about the fact the defensive lineman can't headslap a lineman today as compared to days gone by? Last and certainly not least is the fact that getting off the line of scrimmage in those days was basically the equivalent to hand to hand combat. Damn hard to catch the ball when you have a defensive back literally holding you going down the field.

The rules for the NFL have changed to the point it is almost impossible to use such stats to compare the career stats of players today who aren't even playing the same type of game as they did in the 50's, 60's, and 70's.
 
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