We watch football to witness greatness. There's a special feeling you get when you know with absolute certainty that you're watching a great player in the very prime of his career. These are the times I've had that feeling.
(A few quick notes: I started watching football toward the end of the 2005 season, so I'm only including seasons from 2006 on. I'm listing them in approximate chronological order, and then approximately by position, but there will be exceptions when I feel like talking about an especially awesome season right off the bat. Aside from the narrative, I've also given each season a (superfluous) "Holy Shit Rating" from 1-5 stars. This rating basically quantifies how exciting and electrifying a given season was. That means that it isn't necessarily reflective of the really great seasons, since it's possible for a relatively non-flashy player (e.g. 2013 JJ Watt) to have an absolutely incredible season, but still not give that electrifying a performance (compared to, say, '07 Randy Moss). The way the scale basically works is as follows:
* - You (being the average football fan) wouldn't have known that this player existed if you didn't read all the analysts (hi) gushing about how fucking amazing he is. Prototype: 2005 Walter Jones.
** - You don't notice this player most of the time, but every now and then he comes up with a huge, noticeable play that you cheer at. Prototype: 2013 JJ Watt.
*** - You see this player do lots of exciting things, but you don't always necessarily watch him when he's on the field. It's negotiable. Prototype: 2006 LaDainian Tomlinson.
**** - You watch this player. Your eyes are locked on this player whenever he touches the ball. But he's not quite at that transcendent level. Still electrifying as hell, but not quite as crucial a guy as the five-star guy. Prototype: 2012 Pre-Injury Percy Harvin.
***** - YOU WATCH THIS PLAYER. Even when he's not touching the ball, you don't give a shit, you're watching him. He is the reason you are watching this game. When he's not on the field, you're tapping your foot and clenching your fist waiting for him to come back on the fucking field. If you had a choice between watching this player touch the ball once and watching the birth of your firstborn child, well, your wife's gonna be goddamn disappointed. Prototype: 2007 Randy Moss.
Note that this is NOT a ranking of how great the season was. ALL of these seasons are easily five stars on the standard "greatness" scale. This is exclusively to measure the excitement produced by each given season. Also, please realize that four stars is outstanding and five stars is virtually unattainable. I'm just now writing this list, so I can't say for sure, but there's a very, very, very good chance that there's only two or three five-star seasons on the list. There are around 22,000 possible seasons that are eligible for this list, including ~10,400 by starters and ~216 by players who were named AP First-Team All Pros, and approximately three of them will receive that five-star rating. THAT'S what five stars means. Anyway, let's begin.)
2006:
LaDainian Tomlinson: 1815 yards, 28 TDs, 5.2 YPA, plus 56 catches for 508 yds and 3 TDs. This was Tomlinson's crazy year. The year before, Seattle's own Shaun Alexander did basically a less impressive version of this (1880/27/5.1 + 15/78/1), and immediately afterward Tomlinson blew him out of the water. Both players had superb lines (Shaun's was led by the GOAT LT, Walter Jones; Steve Hutchinson, the fucking traitor; and Robbie Tobeck, while Tomlinson's was led by Marcus McNeill, Kris Dielman, and Nick Hardwick) but Alexander's was better. Both players had ridiculously good, stunningly old fullbacks in Mack Strong (34) and Lorenzo Neal (36) respectively, but Tomlinson's was better. (The line matters more.) But the biggest factor that puts Tomlinson over the top is his exceptional receiving line. The gold standard for the receiving RB is '99 Marshall Faulk, who put up 1381/7/5.5 rushing and 87/1048/5 receiving, but Tomlinson comes in just behind him, notching not only his '06 masterpiece but also his fucking absurd 2003 statline: 1645/13/5.3 on the ground plus 100/725/4 through the air. He touched the ball 413 times that season, which I'm willing to bet is the record for carries+receptions (Faulk's best was 410 in '98, and again, he's the gold standard). ***
Devin Hester: 47 punt returns for 600 yds and 3 TDs, 12.8 Y/R. 20 kick returns for 528 yds, 2 TDs, 26.4 Y/R. Plus a missed field goal returned for a TD and a KR for TD in the Super Bowl. Devin Hester in 2006 was hands-down the greatest kick returner I've ever seen, and it's not remotely close. He's one of three players I've witnessed who I feel confident in saying should go down in history as the greatest of all time at his position. (The others are Peyton Manning and Walter Jones. JJ Watt will get there as well, and Rob Gronkowski is easily that good if he can stay healthy.) The REALLY crazy part is that there's a decent argument for Hester as the GOAT at two positions, since PR and KR really are different enough to be considered separate positions. Very few guys can even play both, let alone dominate both like Hester. Watching Hester return balls in the '06 was one of the highlights of my youth. He was pure electricity. That missed field goal, where he walked out of the endzone and then broke it for a TD. That opening kickoff in the Super Bowl, where it felt like everyone in the country knew he was going to take it to the house, and then he did. That game where poor Jeff Wilkins, the Rams' kicker, and his team showed the pinnacle of misplaced hubris and handed Hester four kickoffs, which he promptly turned into 225 yards and two touchdowns. You may not realize this if you didn't watch football back in '06-'07... Hold that thought. *****
2007:
Devin Hester: 42 punt returns for 651 yds and 4 TDs, 15.5 Y/R. 43 kick returns for 934 yards, 2 TDs, 21.7 Y/R. Where was I? You may not realize this if you didn't watch football back in '06-'07, but there was a time when Devin Hester was one of the scariest people in the NFL. (In '06, it was him, hands-down. In '07 he was #2 to Moss.) His prime was short-lived; in 2008, the Bears stupidly decided to try to make him play wide receiver, as if the marginal value he provided as the greatest returner of all time by far wasn't enough, and his returning career took a nosedive before a brief resurgence in '10-'11. But in his prime, he was something truly transcendent. Before the Broncos @ Bears game, Denver punter Todd Sauerbrun famously said, "We're going after it. We're not going to kick away from him." Hester, naturally, returned a punt and a kickoff for touchdowns (both from Sauerbrun) and singlehandedly won the game for the Bears. As the announcer said after Hester returned his second touchdown, "This is unbelievable. This is unbelievable!" And it was. *****
Tom Brady: 68.9% cmp, 4806 yds, 50 TDs, 8.7% TD%, 8 int, 1.4% int%, 8.3 Y/A, 117.2 PR, 8.88 ANY/A. This is the first truly great QB season I ever saw. Tom Brady started out his career as a little bit of a confusing entity. He won three Super Bowls in his first four years as a starter, but he did so without putting up the same level of stats as his rival Peyton Manning. This is primarily because, until '07, Brady was throwing to the likes of Troy Brown, Deion Branch, David Patten, David Givens, Kevin Faulk, Daniel Graham, and Ben Watson. You think I'm cherry-picking names, but those are the Patriots' leading receivers from 2001-2006 (combined). Meanwhile Peyton was throwing to Marvin Harrison, Reggie Wayne, Marcus Pollard, Brandon Stokley, Edgerrin James, and Dallas Clark. I'm not trying to make an argument in the Brady-Manning debate here (I already came down on the other side of that one, if you weren't paying attention earlier); I'm just saying that Brady, for the first six starting seasons of his career, wasn't working with a lot of talent receivers-wise.
That changed in '07. Prior to the season, the Patriots acquired Wes Welker (who previously had been a mediocre wide receiver and kick/punt returner for the Dolphins), Randy Moss (who had started off his career hot as hell (figuratively speaking) in Minnesota before dropping off the face of the earth in Oakland), Donte Stallworth, and Kelley Washington. The first two panned out in a BIG way, the third one panned out a little, and the fourth one flopped. Brady, meanwhile, put up a season that still stands as one of the greatest of all time. He and the Patriots offense broke dozens of records, blowing teams out left and right en route to the NFL's first ever 16-0 regular season record. Unfortunately, tragically, heart-breakingly, the Patriots lost in the Super Bowl to the New York fucking Giants, and the greatest team season I've ever witnessed came to a catastrophic end. But Brady made a name for himself as one of the greatest QBs of all time, not just based on his postseason performance, but also on his regular-season dominance. ****
Randy Moss: 98 catches, 1493 yards, 23 touchdowns. The Freak. He started his career in Minnesota by catching 69 balls for 1313 yards and 17 TDs, and got better from there. In 2003, he notched one of the all-time greatest seasons ever by a wide receiver, putting up the absolutely comical numbers of 111 catches for 1632 yards and 17 TDs. For six years, he terrorized the league, averaging over 85 catches, nearly 1400 yards, and 13 touchdowns per season. But when he stumbled in '04, the Vikings inexplicably traded him to the Raiders, where he promptly stopped trying. By 2006, the league had nearly forgotten the name Randy Moss, and his menacing silhouette had all but receded into the mist of mythology.
In the 2007 offseason, when the Patriots traded for Moss, people laughed. They thought it was a joke. The same Randy Moss, they quipped, who had topped 1000 yards only once in the past three years, and even then by the narrowest of margins? The same Randy Moss who was 30 and seemed to have lost a step or two, if not three? But there were some, even then, who felt the same primal fear stirring within them that had once driven them to hide behind their couches every time Moss stepped on the field. I was too young to remember Moss back in his golden years, but even then, at the tender age of 14, I knew the importance of a quarterback to a wide receiver, and I knew that Brady had the potential to turn Moss into something truly devastating.
It started with a bang. The Pats blew out the Jets 38-14, and Moss caught 9 balls for 183 yards and a touchdown. Immediately, it was clear that the Freak was back. Next game: 38-14 Pats, 105/2 for the Freak. Next game: 38-7 Pats, 115 and 2. Next game: 34-13 Pats, 102/2 for Moss. It continued in this fashion: 34-17 Pats, 48-27, 49-28, 52-7, and touchdown after touchdown for Randy. In the highlight of the season, Moss caught 10 balls for 128 yards and 4 touchdowns (in the first half), in a 56-10 blowout of the Bills. In the end, it was sixteen wins for the Patriots, 589 points for the offense, and 23 touchdowns for Randy, breaking Jerry Rice's then-20-year-old record.
The Patriots, of course, lost in the Super Bowl, and Moss was good but never quite the same again. But in 2007, for a single magical season, the Freak returned, and he created a masterpiece. *****
Bob Sanders: 3.5 sacks, 2 ints, 6 PD. The stats don't even begin to describe the level of dominance that Bob Sanders displayed when he was on the field. He played eight seasons, and played six or fewer games in six of them. In 2005, he played 14 games and was named First-Team All-Pro and probably deserved DPOY (it went to Urlacher). In 2007, he played 15 games, was FTAP, and deservingly won DPOY. This is basically equivalent to the crazy Kurt Warner stat, where whenever he started a full season his team made it to the Super Bowl, and whenever he made it to the Super Bowl he threw for more yards than any other quarterback to ever make it to the Super Bowl. The difference was that Sanders was a lot better, but the effect was similar: When Sanders was out, the Colts defense was middling-to-bad. They couldn't stop the pass or the run effectively. But when Sanders took the field, suddenly the Colts were unbeatable in both respects.
Here's an imperfect estimate of Sanders's impact on the Colts' defense, which will nevertheless give you an idea of just how great he was: In 2004, when Sanders didn't play, the Colts defense (in PPG allowed) ranked 19th. In '05 he played and they ranked 2nd. In '06 he was injured and they ranked 23rd. In '07 he came back in peak form, and they ranked 1st (and won the Super Bowl). And in '08, with Sanders once more missing more than half the season, they dropped back down to 7th. That kind of an impact is virtually unparalleled in football history. That's the greatness of Bob Sanders. **
This is the end of Part I. There are a few more players from '07 I want to write about (especially Walter Jones), but I'll get to them in the start of Part II. Expect me. Like you expect Jesus to come back. Expect me. I'm coming.
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