Professional Football Researchers Association Forum

Young got in on testimonials and the old "eye test"


Mark Schlereth: One of the things about Hall of Fame voting that is interesting to me, and I think for a lot of guys is that it’s not so much about statistics but how you felt about a particular player. It’s one of those things, I don’t know exactly how to explain what a Hall of Famer is, but I know one when I see him.

When I played and we played the Niners, I played left guard for Denver at that time. I played against Dana Stubblefield, who was a defensive player of the year and had all kinds of accolades. When we played the Niners, our coaches told me you’re one-on-one this weekend with Stubblefield because the other dude (Bryant Young) is a real live bitch, that sumbitch can play. You’ll be fine on the other side against the defensive player of the year, but we need help and we’re going to turn protection to BY. That’s the kind of respect our coaches had for BY, that’s the kind of respect we had for him as a player

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Robbie Tobeck: . . . One of the things that has always stood out to me about him was that he would go to wearing your ass out the entire game and never said a word, never talked. I played against both him and Stubby (Stubblefield) and the game plan was always to look for Bryant Young. Always double him.

What you hate as an offensive lineman is I don’t mind playing against a Warren Sapp type guy, who was a Hall of Fame guy and a great player, but you kind of knew what Warren was going to give you. You just had to try to stop it. But a guy like Bryant, you just didn’t know what he was going to give you. He could bring the power, he could bull rush you, he could beat you with quickness, he had a great counter move, he was the total package

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Adam Timmerman: I personally scouted him more than anybody else. He’d chatter those feet a little bit and then he’d have that club move. If you gave him one hand, he’d knock that one off and be gone. . . Bryant was just so quick, and he had that power move combined with the quickness that he was going to close in on the quarterback. He was probably not going to get away unless you had Michael Vick at the time. When people ask me who were the best guys you ever played against from 1995 to 2006, I’d say the best defensive players were inside. I say John Randle, Bryant Young and Warren Sapp, those three and in that order.

Bryant was John Randle without all the talking. He did his talking with his pads. Nothing but respect for him. A classy guy. Made great plays, worked his butt off. You never heard about it, he just did it quietly. Maybe that hurts him now in Hall of Fame voting, I don’t know how all that works. I just know he was a classy guy who I have a lot of respect for, who played his butt off. You were in for a long day, and you had better come prepared and ready to work all day or he was going to wear you out.

He was a game-changer. And I agree with Kevin as far as against the run BY might be the top out of those three I mentioned – Randle, Sapp, BY. Against the run, he could launch himself in there and had the power to withstand and take on a double team. Looking at him he wasn’t a big menacing guy, but he could hold his own against a double team. He played the run harder than those guys.
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Kevin Gogan: (on practicing against Bryant) They didn’t put in the paper what happened on Wednesday and Thursday. I was pretty happy about that.

I completely agree with everything that has been said here, except for the fact that Adam said about the order of his top three players. I agree with the top three players. What I don’t agree with is…Bryant Young was a beast on the run. He could play both (pass and run) equally as well. . . . BY did equally as well on the pass and the run. There was no play off and there was no break whatsoever.

Not to belabor the point on this and I hate talking ill of a fellow Golden Domer in Bryant Young, but I feel you could find similar references for other players who won't ever or should never reach the HOF by their contemporaries. At some point the rubber needs to meet the road with production and awards etc in reality. If Young was THIS great and THIS unreal, I just feel like there would be "more meat on the bone" so to speak.

Hail Casares wrote:At some point the rubber needs to meet the road with production and awards etc in reality.

According to who? According to what bylaw?

The best analysis is logically going to come from coaches and players who actually played with/against a guy or had to coach them/against them, not media personnel and sportswriters who are also prone to their own bias as well.

Ness wrote:

Hail Casares wrote:At some point the rubber needs to meet the road with production and awards etc in reality.

According to who? According to what bylaw?

The best analysis is logically going to come from coaches and players who actually played with/against a guy or had to coach them/against them, not media personnel and sportswriters who are also prone to their own bias as well.

According to...me. I figured this would be obvious. No one is here debating IF Bryant Young is in the HOF, he is. So there's obviously no "by-law" or "rule" keeping him out. The question is "should he" be and that's a person by person opinion.

I disagree the best analysis comes from players who played with or against them. There can be bias there as well. Just as anywhere. (Buddy Ryan said Todd Bell was the best player on the 1984 Bears defense) In either case, that doesn't even speak to my point because as I said you find testimonials about all kinds of players from people singing their praises about how great they were and no one would put them in the HOF.

At some point these things need to connect. The best analysis is connecting all the dots. Not just saying "Well if Mark Schlereth says so!" (God knows we've seen him be wrong a ton) Were these players not saying this at the time of Young's career to writers and personnel that were voting? If so, why or why not? Why did this narrative not take hold during his career? PBs were fan votes anyways.

Respectfully, I totally agree that the coaches and players give the best perspective because they know what's happening on the field. There are some players, like Reggie White is the first to come to mind, he's spectacular and obviously great because you can witness the difference he makes without being on the field. There are some guys who cause havoc on the field but it might not pile up on a stat sheet or be as visible to an average fan or writer (or even a fairly knowledgeable one). If a guy is in position 100% of the time and because of that the play goes a completely different direction and loses 2 yards, it's much harder to know that unless you're on the field. Adjusting the team's blocking scheme to limit one guy -- if you're on the field you know that. If you're watching the game, there's a good chance that you won't.

Hail Casares wrote:

Ness wrote:

Hail Casares wrote:At some point the rubber needs to meet the road with production and awards etc in reality.

According to who? According to what bylaw?

The best analysis is logically going to come from coaches and players who actually played with/against a guy or had to coach them/against them, not media personnel and sportswriters who are also prone to their own bias as well.

According to...me. I figured this would be obvious. No one is here debating IF Bryant Young is in the HOF, he is. So there's obviously no "by-law" or "rule" keeping him out. The question is "should he" be and that's a person by person opinion.

I disagree the best analysis comes from players who played with or against them. There can be bias there as well. Just as anywhere. (Buddy Ryan said Todd Bell was the best player on the 1984 Bears defense) In either case, that doesn't even speak to my point because as I said you find testimonials about all kinds of players from people singing their praises about how great they were and no one would put them in the HOF.

At some point these things need to connect. The best analysis is connecting all the dots. Not just saying "Well if Mark Schlereth says so!" (God knows we've seen him be wrong a ton) Were these players not saying this at the time of Young's career to writers and personnel that were voting? If so, why or why not? Why did this narrative not take hold during his career? PBs were fan votes anyways.

Fair enough. You're right, he's in. And that's all that matters. Bias or not (which anyone can have not just players/coaches) I'd still say the opinion of five guys that played against him a ton, and are able to compare him to other guys that were around at the time holds more weight than any sportswriter, or yahoo on the internet like us that most likely never coached or played at that level.

Its funny how a page of comments, just disappeared ... haha

Pro Football Journal did an article about Proscout Inc, from july of 2019, where they picked an evaluated team of players who they felt were deserving of the HOF. Hope you guys check out the article. Bryant Young was on their team and so far six players, including Young, Boselli, Pearson, Branch, Shell and Seymour have made the Hall since then. Gradishar is on their team as well and should be in this coming year ...

Something that shoots down some of the arguments being made here about how experts – players, personnel directors, scouts, coaches, etc. – think Young is so great is that a closer look indicates that he did WORSE among the experts than writers in postseason honors. The Sporting News picked all-pro teams during the entirety of Young’s career that were selected by a combination of these experts and he was a first team TSN selection exactly twice in his 14-year career and never once made their second team. While the Pro Bowl is much-maligned, players and coaches do have significant say and they selected Young four times in 14 years including exactly once as a starter.

Mention should be made of one special sportswriter, Paul Zimmerman (Dr. Z). Zimmerman probably looked at more game film than any sportswriter who ever lived and he was well-known for his knowledge of inside football, especially line play. As I recall, he was a lineman in college (Stanford?) and also played semi-pro ball. He also selected all-pro teams during all of Young’s career and named him first team twice and never second team.

Seems like the “experts” didn't think all that highly of Young while he was playing and then inexplicably had a massive change of heart from 20 years ago to today.

As far as the opinions of contemporary players, they can be valuable but they’re also a minefield. As has been said, you can find a knowledgeable expert to tout just about anybody as a Hall of Famer. If you have an opinion you want validated, all you have to do is keep going until you find someone who agrees with you, which you invariably will no matter who it is you're talking about. When I interviewed Lou Creekmur years ago, the HOF came up and he rattled off a very long list of players he thought belonged in the HOF including Gil Mains and Charlie Ane. Of the many players he touted, the only one who has thus far made it, thankfully, is Dick Stanfel.

I also once heard long-time coach and expert Jerry Glanville during his TV days state on national TV before millions of people that Jim Brown wasn’t really that good and that Jim Taylor was much better.

Andy Piascik wrote:Seems like the “experts” didn't think all that highly of Young while he was playing and then inexplicably had a massive change of heart from 20 years ago to today.

Sorry if people heard this before, but I call it the "Rick Reuschel Effect"...a guy I've seen pitch for most of his career, the guy retires, and then 20 years later I'm told by SABR that I had been witnessing a Hall of Fame pitcher. Who knew, right?

Did anyone ever consider Bryant Young a HOF-caliber player when he played? And furthermore, if Young was passed over for honors during the 1990's, wasn't that decade almost like a "dead era" of DTs? You had guys in the NFC like Leon Lett and Luther Ellis making the pro bowl.

One more baffling piece of this situation is that Michael Dean Perry was rated very highly by the experts while he was playing. The aforementioned Sporting News all-pro team, the one selected by a combination of NFL coaches, scouts, talent evaluators, personnel directors, etc., had Perry on their first team FIVE times (1989-93), compared to Young’s two. In the Pro Bowl, which includes votes from players and coaches, Perry was named six times including four times as a starter compared to 4/1 for Young.

The all-pro team selected by the Newspaper Enterprise Association was based on votes of experts (coaches, players, talent evaluators, etc., though the combination changed over time) and was looked at in some circles as the most prestigious for that reason. I believe it was often even referred to as the “player’s all-pro team” with the implication being that it was the team players were most proud to be selected to. Well, Perry was named first team by the NEA twice and second team once in three consecutive years (1989-91) until it, unfortunately, was discontinued. Had the NEA team continued, it’s reasonable to believe Perry would have been picked additional times to what John T has referred to as “the ultimate team.”

Bolstering Perry’s high rating among the experts is that he often did much better with them than he did with the media when it came to postseason honors. In 1992 and 1993, for example, he was named first team all-pro by the players (Sporting News) while not appearing anywhere on any of the media teams. In 1991, he was similarly named first team by SN (players) and second team by the NEA (experts) while the AP was the only media entity that named him.

So basically what we have is experts at the time clearly rating Perry as a great player during a 6-7 year period. The experts were also regularly rating him much higher than the media. And going just by the all-pro teams selected by the experts, those experts considered Perry a vastly better player than Young at the time each was playing.

The question again, then, is what caused the drastic change from 20-30 years ago to now? Did the experts suddenly find a big hidden cache of game films that revealed that Perry wasn’t a great player after all but rather one who was dramatically inferior to Young? Did they also find a bunch of films that show Young was a great player and that all those experts who picked him to their all-pro team exactly twice in 14 years were full of bull?

Sorry, none of this makes any sense. Young’s election is a very weak one and yet another mistake.