When I think of NFL Legends, I think of names like
Montana
Rice
Elway
Marino
Aikman
Smith
Taylor
Singletary
Landry
Ditka
Peyton
Shula
Staubach
When I think of BIG PLAYS I think of
The Catch
The Drive
Lynn Swann
Immaculate Reception
Fumblerooski
Most of this stuff is from the 1980s or so, when I was a teenager, or highlights popular in the 1980s that occurred in the 1970s. Some stuff from the 1990s.
Going back a way, I think of Namath, Lombardi, Butkus, Unitas and a few others, but less in quantity than the 1980s. The further back in time, the fewer names or big plays stand out as legendary.
Looking forward form the 1980s, I also have a harder time thinking of potential legends in the salary cap era. Tyree? Manning? Brady? Brees?
It seems most fo the stuff I consider legendary comes from the 1970s or 1980s. This may be becasue it’s my childhood and teen years and had a more lasting impression on me.
I am hard pressed to name many legends from pre-1960s. Halas, Brown. I can’t think of any big plays.
There were plenty of big plays and big name players before The Catch, but they have faded in the collective memory. Maybe it’s because of the rise of mass media around the 70s and 80s, and not so memorable just because it’s when I was a kid.
Into the 2000s, I also have a hard time thinking of players or plays as legendary. However, there is more media now than there was in the 1980s. I think this is because when I see a good team, a great player, or a great play today, it doesn’t sink in as legendary because “it’s already been done.” The Tyree catch was probably just as remarkable as The Catch, but no catch will ever again be The Catch. Maybe players are less notable today because they move around in free agency.
So, in my mind, the pre-1970s and pre-1980s legends are fewer and seem to have faded from the collective memory. The post-1980s and post-1990s legends seem to be fewer because it’s hard to accomplish something new that doesn’t just seem like a repeat of The Catch, The Drive, etc.
Thus, in my mind, the 1970s and 1980s seem to have a pretty good lock on legendary things in the NFL.
Will the legends of the 1970s and 1980s fade in the collective memory like the legends of the 1950s have? 30 years from now, when asking a stranger on the street to name an NFL legend, will that person likely easily name many players from the 2010s and be hard pressed to come up with legendary names from the 1980s, or will the 1970s and 1980s forever be locked into the public mind as NFL Glory Days? Do people today, older than I, who watched the NFL as a kid in the 1950s and early 1960s, think of a lot of players of the time as legendary or do they also think of the legends of the 1970s and 1980s as more prominent? Perhaps they see Montana as just a rehash of Unitas? Would the older crowd say something like, “Singletary is nice, but he’s no Bob Lilly.”
I don’t know why the hell I am thinking of this stuff.