Former Minnesota Viking Randy Moss was the tallest, fastest, and most dangerous wide receiver in the history of the game.
If Moss didn’t have the best hands in the game, please tell me who did. Also tell me who could run 25 miles an hour, keep those hands low and then hop them up for a fingers catch over track champions and career-long double-teams.
I did not say Moss was the ‘greatest’. Greatness is an overused word for a higher argument. For example, I consider Walter Payton to be the greatest football player I’ve ever seen, but not the best running back.
‘Best’ is defined as:
1) As an adjective: of the most excellent, effective, or desirable type or quality.
2) As a noun: that which is the most excellent, outstanding, or desirable.
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Imagine a symposium of the NFL’s greatest coaches. Vince Lombardi, Joe Gibbs, Bill Parcells, Bill Belichick, and finally, Bill Walsh.
Ask them–in a hypothetical retrospect–who they would choose if they had one choice of ONE wide receiver to put on their team, Jerry Rice or Randy Moss. They can’t have both.
Let them judge by ten years of performance, rookie season to age 30, but put both men at their prime athletic age of, say, 22-25.
All team variables are constant. This means the quarterback is someone like Rich Gannon or Daunte Culpepper. Neither receiver has ever played with either quarterback, and the season starts in a few months. The ‘team’ has a good running game, good defense, good special teams, or if you’d like, is poor in all three regards.
I truly believe that each one of those coaches hardly hesitates (except Mr. Walsh, who is slightly reluctant) before answering:
“Randy Moss.”
Thank you, good night.
It is certainly true that Jerry Rice owns every record worth keeping in the big wide-receiver book. Most receiving yards, most receiving touchdowns, receptions, etc. It’s also likely they don’t get touched in our lifetime and beyond. Rice’s twenty years in the league are extraordinary, his work ethic is legendary, and his place on NFL’s Mount Rushmore is carved in stone.
To most of the world, RICE is the GOAT.
However, that didn’t stop Randy Moss, at the end of his last season in the NFL in 2013, from immodestly confessing that he thought he was the best to ever to play the game at the wide receiver position.
Instantly, Moss had reaffirmed his status as a villain to fans and press alike.
Jerry Rice himself even offered an opinion on Moss’ statement later that year:
“I still say this today — I think Randy Moss was the most talented (wide receiver). I was not the most talented, but I was going to outwork you. He’s (Moss) 6-5, could run a 4.3. Could outjump you. Struck fear in the heart of the defense. But you have to have it here, in your heart.”
These comments were one, pretty convincing testimony that Moss truly was the best, and two, perplexing in Rice’s sentimental conclusion.
Was Jerry actually telling us that Randy Moss, who played for 14 seasons, had 982 receptions for 15,292 yards and was second only to Rice himself with 156 touchdowns, didn’t have heart?
As Coach Mike Ditka would say, “who you crappin’?”
To the point of things, Rice continued:
“I know he (Moss) says you can’t bring the stats into the scenario, but I think that’s part of being the best receiver to play the game. Also, you put my numbers up against Randy’s , and my body of work compared to his, and there’s a big difference.”
So let’s compare that body of work, for clarity, and perhaps to the peril of my argument.
Jerry Rice ended his career at age 42 with 208 touchdowns. 159 of those touchdowns were thrown by legendary Hall-of Famers Joe Montana and Steve Young. Randy Moss ended his career at age 35 with 156 TDs, of which only 40 were delivered by legendary future HOFer Tom Brady.
Debating the best players of NFL history through statistics can be an icy path. Does anyone consider Emmitt Smith the best running back to ever play the game? Of course not, though he clearly wears the belt on paper.
In 1985, the rookie Jerry Rice joined the defending Super Bowl champion San Francisco 49ers, lead by quarterback Joe Montana. The Niners had won 2 Super Bowls in 3 years, 1982 and 1984.
In that rookie season for Rice, the Niners went 10-6 and lost in the NFC divisional playoff round.
Jerry Rice’s first ten years was spent exclusively in San Francisco, with the best front office in professional sports and those two guys named Montana and Young. He was an amazing player on a perennial world-championship caliber team. He won three Super Bowls there.
For the record: Lynn Swann won four Super Bowl rings in Pittsburgh a decade earlier.
In contrast, in 1998, rookie Randy Moss joined the 9-7 Minnesota Vikings (4th in the NFC Central Division) who had also lost in the NFC divisional playoff round.
In that year (‘98), Moss shocked and dominated the NFL from his first game (where a Tampa Bay defense watched the Minnesota Viking rookie catch four balls for 95 yards and two touchdowns), and finished a rookie season with 69 receptions, 1313 yards and 17 touchdowns.
Talk about a record not going away any time soon.
An entirely new stratagem of defense had to be created because of the Viking rookie wide-receiver. It is was called the ‘Tampa Two’ (a Cover-2 shell defensive zone that held two safeties deep), a flat-out necessity for then Tampa Bay head coach Tony Dungy, who, in the NFC Central at the time, would see the Vikings and Moss twice a year.
In that first season, the Vikings lost ONE game by a field goal, went 15-1, and missed the Super Bowl because a veteran placekicker cruelly shanked a chip shot in the 1998 NFC Championship Game.
The owner of the 1998 Minnesota Vikings was Billy Joe “Red” McCombs–a car salesman.
The quarterback for that crazy 1998 season was, for two games, journeyman Brad Johnson, then a recycled blast-from-the-past named Randall Cunningham, who would never have another meaningful season in the NFL
NINE seasons later, in 2007, after racking up incredible numbers in fleeting partnerships with quarterbacks like Daunte Culpepper, Jeff George, Gus Frerotte, Kerry Collins and a sundry of athletes who barely got bubblegum cards, Moss joined Tom Brady and Bill Belichick in New England.
The new Patriot wideout was a supernova of production during the 2007 season, catching an NFL record 23 touchdowns and leading New England to the first undefeated regular season in NFL history.
Randy Moss ran past the swiftest defenders in the game like they were running backward. Moss didn’t just beat single coverage, he beat triple-zone coverage. He beat everything, and with a 47-inch vertical leap, made the catches only Randy Moss could make.
He was so good that CBS broadcaster Howie Long once said of him:
“He’s too good for this league! You got another league?!”
So–returning to the coaches.
Randy Moss comes around ONCE in a lifetime. You pick him.
So, congratulations, Randy, you’ve now made the ultimate list of great NFL players. No one worth their salt denies what you’ve done on the football field. Everyone enjoyed watching you play and Minnesota Vikings fans around the world will miss the memories you brought to us.
In fact, if there are three things missing these days from our lives, they are these wonderful words–
“Bomb to Moss!”
When that ball was in the air, we were always sure you would come down with it. Thanks for being a Minnesota Viking.
View Comments
It was incredible to watch the plays with Moss. If only the Wilfs had been the owners then along with Spielman helping Green. The Vikings might have won multiple championships. The team was very offensively talented & needed 2 or 3 defensive playmakers to be dynastic. Oh well.