The Sporting News Selects Football's 100 Greatest Players: A Celebration of the 20th Century's Best

Strap on your helmet and prepare to knock heads: Every page of Football's 100 Greatest Players dares you to challenge it. The volume's gutsiness, however, is its essence; unlike many similar assemblages, the list is presented in numerical order, with each entry drawing its own proverbial line of scrimmage. The surprises begin right at Number 1: Browns running back Jim Brown. "He came, he saw, he conquered," writes Smith, "And then, like a thief in the night he disappeared from professional football with every rushing record known to man." Numbers 2 and 3 are pretty startling, if only for their contemporary contemporaneousness--Jerry Rice and Joe Montana, together again. The rest of the Top 10 is spread around the field, both temporally and by position: Lawrence Taylor, Johnny Unitas, Don Hutson, Otto Graham, Walter Payton, Dick Butkus, and Bob Lilly. John Elway sneaks into the Top 20 at 16, and old stalwarts like Red Grange and Jim Thorpe hover down in the 80s--with Bret Favre.

The real difficulty in ranking football players is the apples-and-oranges subjectivity of comparing a center (Jim Otto, ranked number 78) to a defensive end (Gino Marchetti, 15), a cornerback (Night Train Lane, 19), a linebacker (Mike Singletary, 56), a fullback (Bronko Nagurski, 35), or a wide receiver (Fred Biletnikoff, 94). Some, like Frank Gifford, Paul Hornung, and Jim Taylor, don't even make the cut. The 100 who do, though, get deluxe treatment: a full-page photo and Smith's spry textual tour of the player and his accomplishments, with applicable stats at the back of the volume and lots of individualized Top-10 lists, like No. 98--George Blanda's Smartest Quarterbacks--and No. 64--Ted Hendricks's Toughest Runners To Tackle. Still, the fun of Football's 100 Greatest is its interactivity; the moment you open it up, you'll doubtless start looking to blow holes through its defenses. --Jeff Silverman