If a NFL player was transported back to ancient times, how well would he fare as a warrior?

Our friend Sleel actually brought the question to a point for me:

I remember that star player. He was well over six feet, probably 250 lbs or better and looked huge. Problem was that he flat could not fight. He had relied on his size being the intimidation factor.

As a senior, one afternoon he decided to pick on a freshman who was about two thirds his size, maybe 5’6" and about half his weight. The football player’s mistake? The freshman was a welterweight Golden Glove boxer. The freshman beat the football player stupid.

It is not the size of the man in the fight, it is the size of the fight in the man.

Having followed the NFL since 1960 I can’t think of many players that would have been much help in a war. I can only think of two right offhand who ever had combat experience, Tom Landry and Rocky Bleier, have to be a few others but not many. Landry and Bleier weren’t the biggest and fastest but there haven’t been many tougher. 2 a days are nothing compared to living out in the weather on a months long campaign, marching, fighting, being scared lonely horny sick and injured out in the rain… Guys like LT or Jr. Seau would’ve found themselves on all fours surrounded by a bunch of cheering soldiers while a Centurion banged them hard from behind. If a Roman soldier turned tail and ran away during a fight his entire Century was lined up after the battle and every tenth man was killed. Wish we could do that with the Cowboys.

What might be the military career of someone low-born in Rome, but born of freakish genetics that allowed him to become huge and strong, even as a little whippersnapper, on whatever nutrition he was provided?

It’s going to be somewhat the same as a genetic non-freak.

If they’re really poor and a non-citizen (Rome had tons of non-citizens, especially in the early Empire), they’re going to be a grunt in the auxiliaries and not even in a proper Legion (limited to citizens). And if they survive, they might even get citizenship some day.

Even in today’s armies, you don’t have a significantly different career path from the average soldier if you happen to be twice as strong or run twice as fast or shoot twice as well. A single guy is mostly just a guy.

We do have more specialization these days, so such a person might be in the special forces or some other specialization. But their career path wouldn’t be unique by any stretch.

And low born Romans, especially non-citizens didn’t rise very high in the ranks. Actually, you might be better off being a high born non-citizen than a low-born citizen. At least you might be able to afford a horse and better equipment and have a chance at becoming an officer.

Who trained them in shield and gladius techniques, and for how long? If I’m not mistaken, we don’t have even the basic fechtbuchs/fighitng manuals that we have for combat in the high middle ages and renaissance, for this time period. We probably have a few experts who could do a decent job of creating a training regime that does it’s best to simulate tactics and develop basic combat skills with these weapons, but the devil’s int he details.

The force hey would be fighting against would not only have had better training, but actual first hand experience killing people i this manner, as well as with dealing with the unexpected.
These modern day athletes are the best of the best we currently have, and I still say that their odds look REALLY, REALLY bad vs your average Roman unit.

Put them against the best of THEIR best, a group of seasoned legionaries, skilled in personal combat and experts at war, and there is exactly 0 chance the NFL guys come out alive.

Going roughly by memory wasn’t that the one where one of every 10 men is drawn by lot, and his squadmates beat him to death? [or was that the one by vexillation, I never took latin and my memory is sucky today.]

For those of you claiming the sheer size and bulk of the modern NFL player would overwhelm a Roman soldier once the athlete got a chance to learn how to use the appropriate weapons–just how bulky would the NFL player be by that point? You know, when he’s eating a period-typical diet instead of 5,000 calories carefully balanced by a nutritionist, and he doesn’t have access to nutritional supplements and steroids, and he can’t spend a few hours a day lifting weights? Even without him getting a good bout of dysentery or something, it seems like he’d lose a lot of mass in a pretty short time.

They might not have soccer player stamina but it’s not like they’d be tuckered out after a 100m sprint. The linemen especially. Receivers and Running backs cycle in pretty frequently and mostly just have to run. The linemen are shuffling their feet, using their entire body and really engaging all of their muscles and have no subs (especially on the offensive line).

Eh? An entire legion of massive 6’3 300lb+ guys with proper armament going up against a roman legion? I’d say they have some sort of chance. To me it’d be 50/50.

I thought we were discussing a small group.

But no, a full legion? 6,000 NFL players vs 6,000 trained roman legionaries? Lol! It would be a massacre.

They have no training in that kind of warfare, no organization. It would be like sending green troops against them. A few would be killed and the rest would run, only to be cut down by equites as they fled.

Well if you’re lucky you can be in the running to become Emperor like Maximinus Thrax. A low-born provincial of prodigious size and strength, he ascended to the purple.

You can read Gibbon’s recounting of Maximinus Thrax’s lifehere.

Once you get to that many people, the Romans don’t get to dictate what type of warfare it is anymore. The NFL players could just decide it is just a tackle and slash match. Well organized armies have been thrown off their game many times in history when the enemy decided to change the rules and many of them even won. None of those were as athletically talented as pro NFL players. 6,000 NFL players (have there even been that many modern ones?) could ravage just about any small city just because they would scare the crap out of anyone that saw them.

This is a fun game. No one can ever win based on known facts because those that are known are too unrelated. It is just an endless debate like those barbershop guys debating hypothetical boxing outcomes in the movie Coming to America.

Well we can make educated guesses. I don’t see how any reasonable person could possibly think that NFL players could best experienced soldiers.

“Tackle and slash”? That sounds like suicide to me.

Think about it, it’s not like large things charging Roman lines was something that was unheard of. They faced Calvary, and faced off with Germanic tribes with warriors of greater stature, and WAR ELEPHANTS for Crist’s sake.

War Elephant >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> NFL player.

Nitpick, the Roman legionaries didn’t just face Calvary, they nailed our Lord and Saviour to a cross on top of it…

He’s got to fight elephants, too? :dubious:

The OP asked, “…NFL linebacker being transported to roman times, how prized would he be as a soldier?” The correct answer is he would be hella prized! NFL players are incredible physical specimens in the prime of their lives, who train year round on the most modern equipment and using the modern techniques available only to the most elite athletes on Earth. Why wouldn’t he be prized?

Well the question sort of morphed here and there as we went along.

I agree, I don’t see why an NFL player wouldn’t be prized as a fighter - except for the part about not knowing to fight.

I think they would take him and put him in the nearest gladiator arena as a spectacle. Throw the poor bastard to die against lions and bears.

If they were willing to train him for some reason, I don’t see why he couldn’t turn out to be a great addition.

Lol.

Linebackers lead the defense and call the plays, and many of them are captains. They’d make great leaders on the battlefield.

For exactly the same reason NFL players are not prized as boxers, baseball players, or any number of other physical jobs; they wouldn’t know how to do it. Not many NFL players know how to use a spear and shield, do they?

Not a linebacker, but Wilt Chamberlain once allegedly fought a mountain lion and came out on top.

How about we flip the question: How would an ancient Roman warrior transported to a modern army fare? It might serve to illuminate some of the blind spots you guys have in thinking that a modern man, however big and strong and physically gifted, would have in dealing with an Iron Age society.

We know he’s tough. He shouldn’t have to do any of the survival training since his life was a lot rougher than anything our modern forces face, roughly equivalent to a SERE course, except that in his time there was no Geneva Convention, so he would expect to get tortured and/or crucified if captured. Rather a bit more in the way of motivation there.

He’d be disgusted at the relative lack of discipline in marching and formations, since his life literally depended on everyone being in position properly in response to dozens of different flag and drum signals. If some idiot made him go through boot camp, I would expect to find some of his squadmates beaten to bloody shit before they learned that the little guy doesn’t have an off switch. When all fighting is hand-to-hand, and there are basically no cops, cultural training usually defaults to going apeshit immediately instead of a gradual ramp-up in violence. And he’d be a trained veteran killer, so even someone the size of Mr Hypothetical NFL Player would probably be incapacitated or maimed in seconds.

Punished with push ups or latrine duty? <pffft> Please. You wouldn’t get his attention with anything less than severe corporal punishment, and he’d probably treat you with contempt for not being a real officer by meting it out immediately and brutally for infractions.

What does he lack? Any form of training in firearms, explosives, and equipment. He’d be right at home in CQB style; kicking in doors, loaded down with armor and gear, but you’d have to get him trained with firearms first. Archery is very vaguely similar, but not really, and the form of training he’d be familiar with wouldn’t work with modern tactics and weapons.

How long before he’d be a valued soldier? If you didn’t have to throw him in the brig permanently to protect the rest of the soldiers sometime in the first few months, he’d probably make a good little headbreaker in a year or two. He would be far better at some things than the usual raw recruit the Army has to deal with, but would have some educational lacks that even high school dropouts don’t in our society.

He’d have to learn to shoot — which is honestly darn easy since we’ve striven to make firearms very user-friendly and have gotten pretty good at training even complete idiots to use them. Compared to sword, pilium, shield training, it would be a snap. You’d have to undo his training to stand steady under fire, but since that goes against natural instincts more than taking cover, that probably wouldn’t be too hard.

He’d have to get some proficiency in English or whatever local language he ended up with, which would be pretty easy for him since being monolingual was extremely rare anywhere in the ancient world. I wouldn’t bet on him making a good driver, and wouldn’t trust him with complicated machinery. He’d be hopeless with computers, probably even with extensive training, unless everything was standard enough to learn by rote.

He probably would never be more than functionally illiterate if he wasn’t a reader already — and he probably wasn’t. (Contrast this with his trained reliance on memory, and Mr NFL in Ancient Rome would be screwed without writing tools.) That would completely bar him from any kind of special forces or any kind of rank.

He would be a constant problem when interacting with civilians since the cultural standards were completely different from any modern industrial society. He would probably be a discipline problem in the military unless he learned to respect his commanding officer despite the behavioral softness compared to Roman standards.