Jerry Rice

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• Top 6 Football Players of All Time

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• Jim Brown

  Jim Brown played just nine NFL seasons for the Cleveland Browns, from 1957 to 1965, and retired at 30, at the peak of his production, to pursue an acting career — a decision almost no dominant athlete makes, which is part of why his numbers still read the way they do: a career built entirely on a short, uninterrupted run of dominance rather than a decade-plus of gradual decline. He finished those nine seasons with 12,312 rushing yards, leading the NFL in rushing eight of the nine years he played, and never missed a single game despite the physical toll of playing running back in an era with far less protective equipment than today's game. His career average of 5.2 yards per carry remains one of the highest ever posted by a primary workhorse back, and his 104.3 rushing yards per game is still an NFL record. Brown won three NFL MVP awards (1957, 1958, 1965) and led Cleveland to the 1964 NFL Championship, the last major professional championship the city would win for more than five decades. He was also a genuinely elite college lacrosse player at Syracuse, good enough to be inducted into the Lacrosse Hall of Fame separately from his football career — a level of multi-sport dominance rarely seen outside of high school. Brown's activism after football was as significant as his playing career — he organized the 1967 "Cleveland Summit," gathering prominent Black athletes to support Muhammad Ali's refusal of the Vietnam draft. Combined with a statistical peak that still holds up six decades later, Brown's case as the greatest to ever play running back has aged remarkably well.

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• Tom Brady

  Tom Brady was drafted 199th overall in the sixth round of the 2000 NFL Draft, a scouting miss so famous it's now shorthand for the limits of pre-draft evaluation, and went on to become the winningest quarterback in NFL history — 23 seasons, 20 with the New England Patriots and three with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, closing out a career that outlasted several of his own head coaches. Brady won seven Super Bowl championships, six with New England (XXXVI, XXXVIII, XXXIX, XLIX, LI, LIII) and one with Tampa Bay (LV), more than any franchise besides the Patriots themselves has won outright. He was named Super Bowl MVP five times, also a record, and won three regular-season NFL MVP awards across a career that stretched from 2001 to 2022. At retirement he held the career records for passing yards (89,214) and passing touchdowns (649), both by wide margins over the next closest quarterback. The signature moment of his career came in Super Bowl LI: New England trailed the Atlanta Falcons 28-3 in the third quarter before Brady led the largest comeback in Super Bowl history, forcing overtime and winning 34-28. Brady briefly retired after the 2021 season, then returned for one more year with Tampa Bay before retiring for good in February 2023 at age 45 — a level of longevity at an elite level that's arguably as remarkable as the championship total itself, and central to why "greatest quarterback ever" conversations rarely get past his name.

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• Lawrence Taylor

  Lawrence Taylor was drafted second overall by the New York Giants in 1981 and, within his first two seasons, had fundamentally changed how the outside linebacker position was played — his combination of speed and power off the edge forced offensive coordinators to rethink pass protection schemes across the entire league, not just for their games against the Giants. Taylor won NFL Defensive Rookie of the Year in 1981, then Defensive Player of the Year three times (1981, 1982, 1986), and in 1986 became NFL MVP — a genuinely rare honor for a defensive player, achieved by only one other player in the modern era. That 1986 season anchored a Giants team that went on to win Super Bowl XXI, with Taylor adding a second ring in Super Bowl XXV. His unofficial career sack total of 132.5 is widely cited as one of the best pass-rushing careers in NFL history, though it comes with an asterisk worth noting: the NFL didn't officially track sacks as a statistic until 1982, in significant part because Taylor's early dominance made the league realize it needed a way to measure what he was doing. Taylor earned 10 Pro Bowl selections across his 13-season career, all with the Giants, and is still commonly cited by coaches and historians as the single most disruptive defensive player the sport has ever produced — a level of individual impact from a non-quarterback position that few players in any sport have matched.

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• Joe Montana

  Joe Montana quarterbacked the San Francisco 49ers from 1979 to 1992, then closed his career with two seasons for the Kansas City Chiefs, and built a reputation for postseason composure that's still the reference point other quarterbacks get measured against in high-pressure moments — a calm under pressure that earned him the nickname "Joe Cool." Montana won four Super Bowl championships (XVI, XIX, XXIII, XXIV) without ever losing one, and was named Super Bowl MVP three times, a total that still ties him for the most in NFL history. Across those four Super Bowl appearances he threw 122 passes without a single interception, a level of postseason precision that remains essentially unmatched at that volume. The signature play of his career came in the 1981 NFC Championship Game: a game-winning touchdown pass to Dwight Clark in the back of the end zone, still known simply as "The Catch," which sent the 49ers to their first Super Bowl. He topped that eight years later with a 92-yard, game-winning touchdown drive in the final minutes of Super Bowl XXIII against the Cincinnati Bengals. Montana won two regular-season NFL MVP awards and made eight Pro Bowls across his 16-season career, but it's the postseason numbers — four rings, zero Super Bowl losses, zero Super Bowl interceptions — that anchor his case as the most clutch quarterback the sport has produced.

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• Peyton Manning

  Peyton Manning spent 14 seasons with the Indianapolis Colts before finishing his career with four more in Denver, and across that 18-year span won a record five NFL MVP awards — no other player in league history has won more than three, a gap that reflects just how long Manning stayed the league's best pure passer relative to his peers. Manning won two Super Bowl championships, one with the Colts (XLI) and one with the Broncos (50), the second coming at age 39, making him the oldest starting quarterback ever to win a Super Bowl. At retirement in 2016 he held the career records for passing yards (71,940) and passing touchdowns (539), both later surpassed by Tom Brady and Drew Brees but standing as the benchmark at the time. His 2013 season with Denver remains one of the greatest single-season passing performances in NFL history: 5,477 passing yards and 55 touchdown passes, both single-season records at the time. Manning was famous for his exhaustive pre-snap preparation, reading defenses and calling audibles at the line so often that his shouted "Omaha!" cadence became a piece of NFL pop culture in its own right. Manning made 14 Pro Bowls across his career and is still widely regarded as the most cerebral quarterback the position has ever seen — a player whose preparation and film study were as central to his greatness as his arm talent, setting a template other quarterbacks have spent years trying to copy.

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More in Sports

• Robert Killian

  Robert Killian, a former U.S. Army Green Beret with more than 12 years of active service, won the Spartan Race World Championship in 2015 despite having just four races of OCR experience at the time, then won it again in 2019 for two career Spartan World titles. His path to obstacle racing ran through elite military and endurance competition rather than combat sports: he was a high school track star and collegiate runner who won the military division of the Ironman World Championship in Kona in 2009, was named Army Athlete of the Year in 2010, and won the grueling 68-hour Best Ranger Competition in 2016. At World's Toughest Mudder, Killian won the event three times and placed second overall (and first American) at the 2017 edition, completing 105 miles in 24 hours, one of the highest single-event distance totals recorded in the format's history. His combination of two Spartan World Championships and his background as a Best Ranger Competition champion and military Ironman world champion has made Killian one of the most distinctively credentialed competitors in obstacle course racing's history.

• Lindsay Webster

  Lindsay Webster won her first Spartan Race World Championship in 2017, then added titles in 2018, 2021, and 2022 — the 2022 win making her the first-ever four-time Spartan World Champion, male or female, at the time she achieved it. Along the way she set the sport's record for most consecutive Spartan wins with 17 in a row, and her 2021 title came alongside partner Ryan Atkins, who won the men's championship the same year in Abu Dhabi. Her combination of strong trail running speed and reliable execution on OCR's more technically demanding upper-body obstacles gave her a genuinely complete competitive profile that sustained her dominance across changing eras of the sport's growth. Her combination of a record four Spartan World Championships and her 17-race consecutive win streak has made Webster, by most accounts, the most decorated woman in obstacle course racing history.

• Hunter McIntyre

  Hunter McIntyre is a six-time obstacle course racing world champion by his own team's count, having first entered the sport almost by accident — he and a group of friends had loosely talked about doing a Spartan Race together, and he ended up the only one who actually finished it. He went on to become a three-time Hyrox World Champion as well, extending his competitive dominance into that separate hybrid fitness-racing discipline and becoming one of the few athletes to hold major titles in both OCR and Hyrox simultaneously. His path to elite athletic performance ran through bodybuilding and strength training before OCR, giving him a physical profile built for heavy carrying and climbing obstacles that distinguished him from more purely running-focused competitors, and his outspoken public persona helped introduce the sport to broader fitness audiences. His combination of six OCR world championships and his separate three-time Hyrox World Championship has made McIntyre one of the most recognizable and commercially significant figures across obstacle and hybrid fitness racing.

• Amelia Boone

  Amelia Boone, nicknamed "the Queen of Pain," won World's Toughest Mudder three times — in 2012, 2014, and 2015 — with her 2014 title coming just eight weeks after major knee surgery, a comeback timeline that became one of the defining stories of her career. She competed at an elite level while working full-time as a practicing corporate attorney, a combination that gave obstacle course racing a distinctive public profile well beyond its core competitive community during her prime. After shifting focus toward ultrarunning in 2016, Boone suffered a femoral stress fracture that put her on crutches for three months, then a cascading series of additional injuries — a sacral stress fracture, a fully displaced second metatarsal, and three separate heel stress fractures — totaling six bone stress injuries across three years. Her combination of three World's Toughest Mudder titles, including one won eight weeks post-surgery, and her later public account of recovering from six separate bone stress injuries has made Boone one of the most significant and candidly documented figures in obstacle racing's history.

• Ryan Atkins

  Ryan Atkins won the 2016 OCR World Championship in the 3km distance and later took the 2023 OCR World Championship Male 15K title, a span of major championships nearly a decade apart that reflects an unusually long competitive prime for the sport. He won the 2021 Spartan World Championship alongside partner Lindsay Webster, giving the Guelph, Ontario-based couple simultaneous titles in the same event and making them one of OCR's most publicly recognized competitive pairings before Webster went on to become the sport's most decorated woman. His background as a competitive adventure racer before focusing on obstacle course racing gave him a multi-discipline endurance foundation, and the OCR World Championships specifically returned to his home region of Collingwood, Ontario during his competitive prime, reflecting the sport's continued growth in the areas where its top athletes trained. His combination of OCR World Championships seven years apart and his 2021 Spartan World Championship alongside Lindsay Webster has made Atkins one of the most historically significant men's competitors in the sport.