That's not what was said, and I have not heard of players reaching out to other teams before entering the portal. Other teams are contacting players, their families, friends and former coaches and enticing the players to enter the portal. It would be easy to eliminate players reaching out to other teams directly as well. Make it punishable by ineligibility for 1 or 2 years. Also, penalize any teams that don't immediately report such illegal contact directly from a player on another team that hasn't entered the portal. Problem solved.
That's what great leaders do. Aikman was never a great quarterback statistically. For example, back in those days, he usually was considered just outside the Top 10 quarterbacks for fantasy football purposes. However, he was a great leader, and a great winner due to his lack of needing to feed his ego.
It’s no doubt about the record. I’m arguing their legacy. Smith gets flagged because his OL got props from history, while Sanders gets extra credit because his OL was underrated. Emmitt’s original line had ONE HOF talent, Erik Williams, who got injured mid-career and was never the same. Sanders just had one enshrined in Lomas Brown…and there were others near that level. Truth is, Emmitt made his OL better and Sanders hoped his wouldn’t get too much in his way, because he needed the space. It’s not slighting Sanders obvious greatness to acknowledge Smith’s bigger effect on winning championships. That run-and-shoot that Sanders ran behind was a double edged sword. It freed up space to allow him to do his magic, but it wasn’t sustainable in winning. Puts him in the same category as my second favorite RB Gale Sayers.
I think Barry Sanders was the best pure runner in NFL history. However, Barry was a boom or bust runner. Although over the course of the game he would have enough booms that he rolled up huge stats, he also had a lot of runs for negative yards. Part of that was on his offensive line, and part of that was on Barry's penchant for passing up a few guaranteed yards in the hopes of hitting the huge play. Emmitt had great offensive lines in front of him, but he also would take the yards that were available, knowing that the team could always hit a big play the next time around. He rarely had runs for negative yards. That lead to better ability to consistently move the chains with first downs, which leads to more wins.
The interesting part about Jimmy Johnson is that, in my opinion, he proved to be a very average judge of talent when he went to the Dolphins later in his career. When he went there, he said that they had enough talent on that team (when he agreed to go there) to win the Super Bowl. I thought that he was out of his mind. They were nowhere close. He ended up being proved wrong. He also did a horrible job of elevating the talent level on that team.
