Best College RB Combo

I looked it up. Syracuse had Brown carry the ball 158 times. They threw 51 passes in 9 games and a variety of other backs carried the ball 200 times. The next two leading rushers had 71 and 67 carries.

 

Walter Payton and whoever was playing with him that day...

 

The SMU Pony Express was also a professional football team, too.

 

that's great but i like my version better

 

Payton played with fellow Hall of Famer Robert Brazile at Jackson State. They both went in the top 6 in the draft ... FROM JACKSON STATE.

 

That's some pretty good scouting. I wonder if people went to see Payton and then came across Brazile, or vice versa.

 

HOFer Jackie Slater wants to know why you forgot him.

 

Remarkably, there were four players from HCBUs drafted in the first round in 1975: Payton, Brazile, Gary "Big Hands" Johnson, and Hollywood Henderson. Since four years earlier is really when southern schools started to integrate their football teams (the famous Sam Cunningham-Bear Bryant USC-Alabama game was in 1970), they would have been in the last wave of guys who didn't play at bigger schools only because they weren't allowed to.

 

He was a year younger and drafted in the third round, but yeah, he was on that team too.

 

I know. Was just messing with you. I remember as a kid reading back of Topps card and noticing all three of them at Jackson State. Also, they went 7-3 with that talent

 

The Steelers always get credited for the way they scouted HBCUs in the early 1970s (mainly due to Bill Nunn), but the Kansas City Chiefs were doing it years before. Their Super Bowl IV (1969 season) championship team had nearly a dozen starters/rotation players from HBCUs:

FB Robert Holmes (Southern)
WR Frank Pitts (Southern)
WR Gloster Richardson (Jackson State)
WR Otis Taylor (Prairie View A&M)
WR Noland Smith (Tennessee State)
DE Buck Buchanan (Grambling)
LB Willie Lanier (Morgan State)
CB Jim Marsalis (Tennessee State)
CB Emmitt Thomas (Bishop)
SAF Jim Kearney (Prairie View A&M)
KR Willie Mitchell (Tennessee State)

 

And you just know I've gotta use this as a chance to plug the genius of John Gagliardi, whose 1963 Johnnies beat Prairie View for the national title, a Prairie View team with Kearney and Taylor, plus Ken Houston, and 5 others drafted in AFL or NFL.