Not only are these guys big these days they're fast and athletic. Maybe they're the result of genetic engineering :lol:.
About the closest thing to today on that team was Cannon. Notice his size was about as big as some of the tackles but he was also on the track team and won the SEC championship that year in the 100 yard dash at 9.4 AND the shotput. Unusual conbination huh?
I played in the mid '60s. I know leather helmets with no facemasks. :wave: I went to a small, Class B at the time, school. I weighed 165 pounds dripping wet. I think we had 3 or 4 guys between 170 & 190. One of our tackles was 225, but he ran a 12.5 40. :lol:
Does size really matter? http://www.menace-to-society.com/grenade.jpg (Click here) this is what I sent gump buddy back !!:lol:.
That was the regular plan but the Bandits did go in on offense from time to time and the Go team on defense. These guys were athletes, not position specialists, and the White team played a lot of minutes. Billy Cannon was a very big back for his time. At 205 pounds he outweighed all of his White Team linemen except one, who was five pounds heavier. People often forget that Cannon was also an outstanding linebacker and played most of his pro career at tight end.
I can remember a couple of times when the Bandits were on offense and made a first down! You would have thought it was a tochdown, the fans went nuts!:geauxtige
In this book called 50 Years of College Football: A Modern History of America's Most Colorful Sport... It had a little section on Billy Cannon that pointed out things like: --in Cannon's time, it was a common practice for both NCAA and NFL teams to list their players as weighing smaller than they really weighed--so they could have an advantage by making the other team think they were playing a smaller team. Even successful coach John McKay was quoted as saying at a coaches' conference: "who are we kidding? let's be honest about player weights." It wasn't until well into the 60's that the practice of teams under-reporting their player weights lost popularity --with that in mind, in Cannon's time, 220 pounds was considered a monster for even a lineman... so Cannon, as a 208-pound TB was huge for his position --Cannon was one of the first players to use weight-lifting to become a bigger and stronger football player (which would explain why guys were so small back then -- not a lot of them lifted weights. It wasn't until well into the 60's that weight-lifting became a common part of football training). --Cannon wasn't just huge, but he was extremely fast... ran the 100-yard dash in 9.7 in high school and 9.5 at LSU as a sophomore (compare to the 1960 Olympics, where the fastest 100-yard dash run by anybody was 10.2 -- and that set the Olympic record at the time). Although they didn't do the 40-yard dash back then, Cannon is estimated to have run a sub-4.4 forty --Cannon to his time was the equivalent to guys like Hershel Walker and Bo Jackson were to their time. Just unbelieveable phenomenons that rarely come along. --in the pros, Cannon did great as a TB (AFL Rushing leader and All-AFL, 1961) and led the Houston Oilers to back-to-back AFL Championships until an nagging injury affected his speed. After that, the Oilers traded him to the Oakland Raiders and the Raiders made him a FB, and then Raider coach and owner Al Davis transformed Cannon into a TE, at which position Cannon was outstanding and 2x All-AFL.
In 1957, Alex Karras (Iowa, of course) won the Outland Trophy and finished second to John David Crow in the Heisman voting (the highest any defensive lineman has ever finished).... Karras was 6'2", 233 lbs... After reading this thread, he was a very big boy for his time, it would appear... and in a quick google search, I see where Dick Butkus played linebacker at Illinois in 1963 at 6'3" and 244 lbs... damn!
