09-26-2024, 11:27 AM
(This post was last modified: 09-30-2024, 09:38 AM by ProdigalSon. Edited 1 time in total.)
For the 50th Anniversary of the ISFL, a group of users has come together to look over the history of players in the league to determine the greatest of all time by position. Each Thursday, two positions are going to be released until we cover them all. Our goal was to look at career statistics and notable awards such as positional awards, Pro-Bowl, All-Pro, HoF, and championships to determine what player at each position had the greatest career. Using the wiki along with wolfiebot, we’re looking through players over the course of the league’s lifetime from S1-current to find who are the ISFL GOATs. Hope you enjoy!
Oline is one of the most simple positions in the sim, maybe the single most simple. Did you get pancakes? Good. Did you allow sacks? Bad. There are only a couple other factors (awards, all pros, pro bowls) and only a couple big mitigating factors (did you have a swan song season where you allowed double digit sacks, and if so how hard do I punish you for that, or are you Givussafare Rubbe and thus the one old sim OL worth talking about).
Nobody who is even in the Honorable Mentions has major awards (Angus Winchester is not getting on this list for playing only 3 seasons at OL), the only question is how much you value OLotY over 1st team All Pros, and how much you prefer high pancake totals to low sack counts.
Let’s start from the bottom.
5: Manhattan Project
Notable Awards: 7 Pro Bowls, 8 1st team All Pros, 1 2nd Team
Stats: 16th in Pancakes (875), 5 sacks allowed, 175 Pancakes per Sack Allowed
When it comes to Oline, most of the people on this list have something that makes me reward them or punish them more highly than their stats would otherwise suggest. Manhattan definitely falls into the Punish category; If I went purely based off of awards and stats, nobody even comes close to Manhattan Project. I believe he has as many 1st team All Pros as anyone else in league history, all at a position where you couldn’t get a 1st team spot by being the 2nd best player unlike the other players with a ton of 1st teams. While he’s not even top 10 in total pancakes, it’s very very hard to argue who had 7 seasons not allowing sacks, and only 3 that did. The problem? Project was a Center. He was going up against mostly lesser competition both for all pro voting and on the field directly. However, even when the All Pro voting dropped to a single interior Offensive Lineman for 1st team in S36, Project still stood strong and managed to get the lone 1st team slot for each of the final 3 seasons of his career. After one awful season to start his career, along with one good but not great one, Project was maybe the best interior lineman, and definitely the best center, in the entire league for his final 8 seasons. It’s a likely unbreakable streak that gets him on this list all on its own.
4: Bruce Buckley
Notable Awards: 2 OLOTY, 7 Pro Bowls, 2 2nd team All Pros
Stats: 2nd in Pancakes (1339), 18 sacks allowed, 74.4 Pancakes per Sack Allowed
It’s important to note for the All Pros that Buckley was mostly past his peak at the time that we started the voting on those back in S28. The two OLotY and 7 Pro Bowls are the more important stat for this project and judging his all time status. The story those stats tell is a bit of an interesting one; there are 3 periods of his career that can almost be split entirely on team lines. During his time on Arizona and early in his Yellowknife career, 5 seasons, Buckley was a great OLineman for the Old sim, with about 80-85 pancakes per year and generally no sacks allowed. Then Buckley reached his All Time era with the switch to the new sim on Yellowknife; over the next 4 seasons Buckley allowed one sack total and averaged over 120 pancakes per season. These two stretches would have him at 1, but regression hit him too hard and bumped him down a few pegs for me. Over the final 4 seasons of his career, he gave up 15 sacks and only reached his previous heights of pancakes once. Other people on this list, or in contention for this list, had one particularly bad season at the end or beginning of their career, but Buckley fell to only having good or OK seasons for an entire 3rd of his career at the end; that was too much of a hurdle for me compared to everyone else on this list.
3: Stumpy Jones
Notable Awards: 3 OLOTY, 7 Pro Bowls, 8 1st team All Pros
Stats: 1st in Pancakes (1444), 28 sacks allowed (30th among all players), 51.6 Pancakes per Sack Allowed
Stumpy Jones might have the single worst final season of a career I’ve ever seen from a player of his caliber. During his final, 13th season, he had only 63 pancakes to 11 sacks allowed. Those 11 sacks allowed are T-6th worst for any season after the first 3 seasons in the league and are still top 20 even counting all of the terrible OLine that existed when the league began. His Pancakes per Sack allowed before that season was up at 81.2; I might have called him the GOAT without it. But even with how terrible his final season was, I can’t ignore his lead in pancakes or how award-studded his career is. Sure, multiple tackles can be 1st team All Pro, but that doesn’t change that Jones got 8 of them. That’s more than almost every tackle in contention for this list combined! Stumpy spent 10 years of his career averaging over 120 pancakes per season and allowing 6 sacks total, and that’s a rate that nobody else in ISFL history can touch. He has 2 seasons worse than maybe anyone else that I could possibly put in contention for this list and yet the rest of his seasons are still good enough for him to reach top 3.
2: Swantavius Payne
Notable Awards: 5 Pro Bowls, 2 1st team All Pros, 3 2nd team All Pros
Stats: 4th in Pancakes (1209), 12 sacks allowed, 100.75 Pancakes per Sack Allowed
Awards-wise, Payne isn’t quite as decorated as some others on the list, most notably Stumpy right above him. He doesn’t have the Pro Bowls, though I believe part of that is due to recent pro bowls being broken on the bot, and he definitely doesn’t have the All Pros. But what he has, especially compared to Stumpy, is consistency. Stumpy had 1 bad season and 1 all time awful season, Payne bottomed out in his final year with 86 pancakes and 5 sacks allowed. His average year was over 100 pancakes with either 1 or 0 sacks, and while he didn’t often crest astronomically above that threshold, his ability to do so without giving up sacks is basically unparalleled in ISFL history. Only a couple people match him in terms of not giving up sacks, and none of them are in his stratosphere in terms of total Pancakes.
1: Givussafare Rubbe
Notable Awards: 3 OLotY, 4 Pro Bowls
Stats: 27th in Pancakes (745), 11 sacks allowed, 67.7 Pancakes per Sack allowed
Note that he didn’t make the pro bowl for the first 2 seasons that he got OLotY because Rubbe was partly responsible for the reemergence of Oline as a position. He’d probably have 6 or 7 if Pro Bowls allowed OLine from the start of his career. Statistically, Rubbe is the worst single player on this list, though I could see him making the top 10. But in terms of awards, he’s the single best player to ever play the position. Rubbe played almost all of his career, and his entire prime, in the old sim, a much more hazardous and terrible place for OLine. Rubbe’s seasons in DDSPF16 were Greatest of All Time contenders, and helped make people actually start taking the position seriously again. If I just took his All Time Great seasons, such as his 3 seasons in a row getting 75 or more pancakes in the Old Sim without letting up a sack, and made them great but not all time great seasons in the new sim, that’d involve at least 30 more pancakes per season, which would skyrocket Rubbe up the pancake chart. He did not have a great end to his career, letting up 8 of his 11 sacks in a pair of new sim seasons past his prime, but that’s not enough to prevent him from taking the top spot in my eyes.
Before signing off, I wanted to add in an honorable mentions section.
Icebox Riposte is basically a slightly lesser version of Payne; he has a slightly better Pancake to Sack ratio, about the same number of awards, but spent some seasons at guard and has a whole lot less pancakes overall.
Jaja Ding Dong has the 5th most pancakes of all time, but only made a single 1st team, let up 19 sacks in his time as an OL, and had an end to his career that gives Buckley and Jones a run for their money in bad final stretches. While not quite as bad an ending (though a final year with 37 pancakes and 3 sacks allowed isn’t exactly stellar), he didn’t reach either of their heights anywhere near as consistently.
(Editor’s note: I originally wrote this back before S48, and as such the next two people need to be updated. Below is the original blurb I wrote for 2 at the time active players)
Walrus Jones statistically belongs with over 1000 pancakes and only 13 sacks allowed, but really lacks awards and also isn’t even in his 10th season yet; as noted above you usually see big drop offs after that point.
Bengal Tigerheart has maybe the greatest single season for an OL ever in the new sim, but is both still active, seems to already be falling off despite being only in his 8th season, and is significantly worse statistically than Walrus Jones in both respects (over 50 less pancakes and 4 more sacks allowed), and Jones didn’t make the list either.
Follow up after S49:
Walrus Jones did not have as far of a fall off that I feared, and probably ends up as my 6th overall player. He ends up with the 3rd most pancakes ever, with 1214, and only 15 sacks allowed, but that still makes him statistically worse than Swantavius Payne, albeit with higher peaks. But he also had some awfully low valleys, including a season where he allowed 6 sacks in the middle of his career, an almost unforgivable sin for OLine.
Bengal Tigerheart also didn’t have any massive falloff, but remained statistically worse than Jones, and never was consistent: half of the seasons of his career involved him giving up at least 2 sacks, and while he’s 8th in pancakes, he also let up 18 sacks overall. In my mind, you can’t have a worse Pancake to sack ratio than Rubbe while playing in the new sim, and Tigerheart ends up with a 62.3 mark in that category.
And finally, Adam Mellott had an award studded career, with 2 OLotY and a pair of 1st Team awards, and averaged nearly 100 pancakes and less than 1 sack per season, about on par with Payne, but only played for 9 seasons, both avoiding possible late season regression and not racking up enough pancakes to really be on this list.
(2x media on authority of Darkness)
Oline is one of the most simple positions in the sim, maybe the single most simple. Did you get pancakes? Good. Did you allow sacks? Bad. There are only a couple other factors (awards, all pros, pro bowls) and only a couple big mitigating factors (did you have a swan song season where you allowed double digit sacks, and if so how hard do I punish you for that, or are you Givussafare Rubbe and thus the one old sim OL worth talking about).
Nobody who is even in the Honorable Mentions has major awards (Angus Winchester is not getting on this list for playing only 3 seasons at OL), the only question is how much you value OLotY over 1st team All Pros, and how much you prefer high pancake totals to low sack counts.
Let’s start from the bottom.
5: Manhattan Project
Notable Awards: 7 Pro Bowls, 8 1st team All Pros, 1 2nd Team
Stats: 16th in Pancakes (875), 5 sacks allowed, 175 Pancakes per Sack Allowed
When it comes to Oline, most of the people on this list have something that makes me reward them or punish them more highly than their stats would otherwise suggest. Manhattan definitely falls into the Punish category; If I went purely based off of awards and stats, nobody even comes close to Manhattan Project. I believe he has as many 1st team All Pros as anyone else in league history, all at a position where you couldn’t get a 1st team spot by being the 2nd best player unlike the other players with a ton of 1st teams. While he’s not even top 10 in total pancakes, it’s very very hard to argue who had 7 seasons not allowing sacks, and only 3 that did. The problem? Project was a Center. He was going up against mostly lesser competition both for all pro voting and on the field directly. However, even when the All Pro voting dropped to a single interior Offensive Lineman for 1st team in S36, Project still stood strong and managed to get the lone 1st team slot for each of the final 3 seasons of his career. After one awful season to start his career, along with one good but not great one, Project was maybe the best interior lineman, and definitely the best center, in the entire league for his final 8 seasons. It’s a likely unbreakable streak that gets him on this list all on its own.
4: Bruce Buckley
Notable Awards: 2 OLOTY, 7 Pro Bowls, 2 2nd team All Pros
Stats: 2nd in Pancakes (1339), 18 sacks allowed, 74.4 Pancakes per Sack Allowed
It’s important to note for the All Pros that Buckley was mostly past his peak at the time that we started the voting on those back in S28. The two OLotY and 7 Pro Bowls are the more important stat for this project and judging his all time status. The story those stats tell is a bit of an interesting one; there are 3 periods of his career that can almost be split entirely on team lines. During his time on Arizona and early in his Yellowknife career, 5 seasons, Buckley was a great OLineman for the Old sim, with about 80-85 pancakes per year and generally no sacks allowed. Then Buckley reached his All Time era with the switch to the new sim on Yellowknife; over the next 4 seasons Buckley allowed one sack total and averaged over 120 pancakes per season. These two stretches would have him at 1, but regression hit him too hard and bumped him down a few pegs for me. Over the final 4 seasons of his career, he gave up 15 sacks and only reached his previous heights of pancakes once. Other people on this list, or in contention for this list, had one particularly bad season at the end or beginning of their career, but Buckley fell to only having good or OK seasons for an entire 3rd of his career at the end; that was too much of a hurdle for me compared to everyone else on this list.
3: Stumpy Jones
Notable Awards: 3 OLOTY, 7 Pro Bowls, 8 1st team All Pros
Stats: 1st in Pancakes (1444), 28 sacks allowed (30th among all players), 51.6 Pancakes per Sack Allowed
Stumpy Jones might have the single worst final season of a career I’ve ever seen from a player of his caliber. During his final, 13th season, he had only 63 pancakes to 11 sacks allowed. Those 11 sacks allowed are T-6th worst for any season after the first 3 seasons in the league and are still top 20 even counting all of the terrible OLine that existed when the league began. His Pancakes per Sack allowed before that season was up at 81.2; I might have called him the GOAT without it. But even with how terrible his final season was, I can’t ignore his lead in pancakes or how award-studded his career is. Sure, multiple tackles can be 1st team All Pro, but that doesn’t change that Jones got 8 of them. That’s more than almost every tackle in contention for this list combined! Stumpy spent 10 years of his career averaging over 120 pancakes per season and allowing 6 sacks total, and that’s a rate that nobody else in ISFL history can touch. He has 2 seasons worse than maybe anyone else that I could possibly put in contention for this list and yet the rest of his seasons are still good enough for him to reach top 3.
2: Swantavius Payne
Notable Awards: 5 Pro Bowls, 2 1st team All Pros, 3 2nd team All Pros
Stats: 4th in Pancakes (1209), 12 sacks allowed, 100.75 Pancakes per Sack Allowed
Awards-wise, Payne isn’t quite as decorated as some others on the list, most notably Stumpy right above him. He doesn’t have the Pro Bowls, though I believe part of that is due to recent pro bowls being broken on the bot, and he definitely doesn’t have the All Pros. But what he has, especially compared to Stumpy, is consistency. Stumpy had 1 bad season and 1 all time awful season, Payne bottomed out in his final year with 86 pancakes and 5 sacks allowed. His average year was over 100 pancakes with either 1 or 0 sacks, and while he didn’t often crest astronomically above that threshold, his ability to do so without giving up sacks is basically unparalleled in ISFL history. Only a couple people match him in terms of not giving up sacks, and none of them are in his stratosphere in terms of total Pancakes.
1: Givussafare Rubbe
Notable Awards: 3 OLotY, 4 Pro Bowls
Stats: 27th in Pancakes (745), 11 sacks allowed, 67.7 Pancakes per Sack allowed
Note that he didn’t make the pro bowl for the first 2 seasons that he got OLotY because Rubbe was partly responsible for the reemergence of Oline as a position. He’d probably have 6 or 7 if Pro Bowls allowed OLine from the start of his career. Statistically, Rubbe is the worst single player on this list, though I could see him making the top 10. But in terms of awards, he’s the single best player to ever play the position. Rubbe played almost all of his career, and his entire prime, in the old sim, a much more hazardous and terrible place for OLine. Rubbe’s seasons in DDSPF16 were Greatest of All Time contenders, and helped make people actually start taking the position seriously again. If I just took his All Time Great seasons, such as his 3 seasons in a row getting 75 or more pancakes in the Old Sim without letting up a sack, and made them great but not all time great seasons in the new sim, that’d involve at least 30 more pancakes per season, which would skyrocket Rubbe up the pancake chart. He did not have a great end to his career, letting up 8 of his 11 sacks in a pair of new sim seasons past his prime, but that’s not enough to prevent him from taking the top spot in my eyes.
Before signing off, I wanted to add in an honorable mentions section.
Icebox Riposte is basically a slightly lesser version of Payne; he has a slightly better Pancake to Sack ratio, about the same number of awards, but spent some seasons at guard and has a whole lot less pancakes overall.
Jaja Ding Dong has the 5th most pancakes of all time, but only made a single 1st team, let up 19 sacks in his time as an OL, and had an end to his career that gives Buckley and Jones a run for their money in bad final stretches. While not quite as bad an ending (though a final year with 37 pancakes and 3 sacks allowed isn’t exactly stellar), he didn’t reach either of their heights anywhere near as consistently.
(Editor’s note: I originally wrote this back before S48, and as such the next two people need to be updated. Below is the original blurb I wrote for 2 at the time active players)
Walrus Jones statistically belongs with over 1000 pancakes and only 13 sacks allowed, but really lacks awards and also isn’t even in his 10th season yet; as noted above you usually see big drop offs after that point.
Bengal Tigerheart has maybe the greatest single season for an OL ever in the new sim, but is both still active, seems to already be falling off despite being only in his 8th season, and is significantly worse statistically than Walrus Jones in both respects (over 50 less pancakes and 4 more sacks allowed), and Jones didn’t make the list either.
Follow up after S49:
Walrus Jones did not have as far of a fall off that I feared, and probably ends up as my 6th overall player. He ends up with the 3rd most pancakes ever, with 1214, and only 15 sacks allowed, but that still makes him statistically worse than Swantavius Payne, albeit with higher peaks. But he also had some awfully low valleys, including a season where he allowed 6 sacks in the middle of his career, an almost unforgivable sin for OLine.
Bengal Tigerheart also didn’t have any massive falloff, but remained statistically worse than Jones, and never was consistent: half of the seasons of his career involved him giving up at least 2 sacks, and while he’s 8th in pancakes, he also let up 18 sacks overall. In my mind, you can’t have a worse Pancake to sack ratio than Rubbe while playing in the new sim, and Tigerheart ends up with a 62.3 mark in that category.
And finally, Adam Mellott had an award studded career, with 2 OLotY and a pair of 1st Team awards, and averaged nearly 100 pancakes and less than 1 sack per season, about on par with Payne, but only played for 9 seasons, both avoiding possible late season regression and not racking up enough pancakes to really be on this list.
(2x media on authority of Darkness)
