Where were the 6’ 6’ 350 lb monsters in football in the 40’s and 50’s? A big lineman was in the mid 220-250 lb range in those days. Genetic’s hasn’t changed that much in 60 years. Were they hiding in basements?
Better nutrition, better training, better supplements, better drugs, better scouting to find every last genetic anomaly in the hemisphere.
There were always big guys in the league. Most of the OT’s in the 50s and 60s played at the 260-270 range. Modern training, nutrition (and possibly drugs) would easily put 30-40 lbs on them. The real change has been the number of big guys that are athletic as hell too, especially on defense.
My high school football coach played for the Rams in 1951 as a offensive tackle.
Trust me he was every bit as big as the guys playing today.
The average player, especially on the line, is bigger now than 40 years ago. I suspect weight training has enabled some of the bigger guys to become much faster, which makes them more appropriate for the sport. It’s also enabled guys with certain body frames to carry more weight.
Without getting too controversial, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone could somehow link the increased size and/or speed to black athletes. They weren’t really allowed to compete until the 60s. Maybe it’s just that there’s a bigger pool to pull from now.
Also, sports are more popular then they’ve ever been, which may create even more interest in youth sports than before. I can’t say any of this for certain, though.
Possibly around the time when pro basketball players got so tall.
Aren’t the players getting bigger in every sport…? - Basketball, hockey, soccer…? - Athletics…?
I imagine a lot more kids are starting weight training at a much earlier age than they did 40, 50 years ago.
And Americans are just bigger in general than they were 30 years ago.
When Jimmy Johnson came to coach the Dallas Cowboys in the early 90s, “conventional wisdom” was that you couldn’t be over 300 pounds and be athletic enough for the mobile parts of football. He brought in a lot of guys on those teams to change that. Figure that in the 80s Refrigerator Perry was thought freakish at about 370-380, whereas now several teams have players at or near that size.
Just for illustration, look at the 1973 Dolphins, a team that went to the Super Bowl.
Alan Page was an All-Pro defensive tackle at 235 pounds.
Ron Yary was an All-Pro offensive tackle at 255 pounds.
Yes, things have changed, and they changed surprisingly rapidly. The Redskins set the tone, in the early Eighties, both on offense and on defense. Their “Hawgs” were way bigger and stronger than any offensive line I’d seen before, and Dave Butz was the prototype for the massive defensive linemen to come.
Anyone who doesn’t think that PED use is just as rampant in football as it is in baseball is fooling themselves. Compare the number of 300+ lbs guys now to 15 or 20 years ago. The difference is that when the Steeler’s left guard (hypothetical) juices there is no easily quantifiable stat like HR’s that makes it obvious.
Absolutely true. I’ve seen golfers who blot out the sun.
Anyone know if jockeys are getting smaller?
loL 
John Daly’s still golfing? I had no idea.
Randy White of the Cowboys was a manster at 6’4"/257.
Ed “Too Tall” Jones was 6’9"/275.
The Cowboys defensive ends and tackles today look, on average, to be about 6’5"/300.
William Perry was 6’2/330.
I saw a show on HBO (I think) that was talking about some high school teams have lines that are bigger than some NFL teams. They added that when guys get up to 300+ it puts a lot more stress on their legs, hips, joints, etc.
HGH and 'roids.
Doesn’t the NFL have a pretty serious drug testing program? I was under the impression it was fairly effective.
A comparison from another sport. I’m a fan of olympic weightlifting, one of the first sports to unofficially embrace steroid use. By most accounts the use of steroids in that sport became prevalent in the early to mid-1960s. In the early '50s the clean & jerk world record belonged to John Davis, the first man to hoist 400 lbs in the lift. In 1970 Vasily Alexeev became the first to clean and jerk 500 lbs. The current record holder is Hossein Reza Zadeh who has lifted ~582 lbs. Lifters regularly lift upwards of 500 lbs nowadays. None of this is proof of steroid or growth hormone use in pro football of course but I think the increase in the size and strength of the lifters is pretty similar to the progression we see in the football players. As mentioned, the problem of steroids in weightlifting are fairly well known if swept under the rug as much as possible.
The other thing I notice about football players when I watch old games is the speed of the bigger players. Some of the 300+ lb players are pretty damn fast nowadays. The big guys in those old clips don’t move like that.
No reliable test exists for growth hormone AFAIK and some players have been caught with products like the urinator, a device which helps them pass urine tests.