Toughest NFL Players of All Time
Before the toughest players in NFL history can be discussed, we need to define the term. There’s no measure for toughness. It’s an intangible that comes in all shapes and sizes. It can’t be bottled, packaged or weighed. But you know it when you see it. You can even feel it sometimes.
Chicago Bears linebacker Dick Butkus
Toughness is 24/7 reliability. Grace under pressure. Laser focus, no matter how big the moment. Supreme self-confidence. Ability to recover when punched in the gut. High pain threshold. Sweat and hard work.
Toughness is not cheap or dirty. Players who go outside the rules to maim opponents are not tough. They’re cowardly. Here’s looking at you, Hardy Brown, Conrad Dobler and Rodney Harrison. You, too, Bill Romanowski, Jack Tatum and Ndamukong Suh.
These players made the cut.
50. Tommy McDonald, Flanker
Tommy McDonald was the schoolboy who thumbed his nose at the bully. The 5-foot-9, 178-pound fireball of a flanker bounced off tacklers like a human Super Ball. His favorite route? A slant over the middle, of course.
Here’s more crazy: McDonald played without a face mask for virtually his entire career, the last player to do so.
But an image in the 1960 Championship Game said it all. After a frustrated Green Bay Packers defender shoved “Scooter” into a snowbank on a touchdown reception, he gleefully jumped to his feet, then raced to the bench like his hair was on fire.
49. Cliff Harris, Safety
Free safeties were primarily cover guys back in the day. Not Cliff Harris, though. “Captain Crash” broke the mold with his two-way play at the position.
Harris spent his entire career in the 1970s and had at least two interceptions in each one of them. The All-Decade first-team selection welcomed contact, a mindset that translated well against the run and on special teams. He even wore kiddie-sized shoulder pads to improve speed and the force of hits.
Washington Redskins coach George Allen wasn’t far off when he likened Harris to a “rolling ball of butcher knives.”
48. Ed Sprinkle, Defensive End
Chicago Bears defensive end Ed Sprinkle
No less an authority than Chicago Bears coach/owner George Halas considered Ed Sprinkle to be the roughest player in franchise history at one point. But when Collier’s Weekly story called him “The Meanest Man in Football,” well, the defensive end thought that went too far.
“I think that the article was a bum rap,” Sprinkle told National Football Post. “I was about as aggressive as any football player that walked on the field. If I had an opportunity to hit someone, I hit them. … That doesn’t make me mean or dirty.”
Mean, dirty or just plain tough, Sprinkle was a man to avoid between the lines. “The Claw” was known for neck-tie decapitations, which were legal in his time. The southpaw even requested a move to right end so he could behead ballcarriers easier and with more bite.