Receiver Drew Pearson performed well during his era. He thinks he would have performed even better now.
“First of all you’d have to visit me in jail because I’d be illegal,” Pearson said on the ESPN Football Today podcast, via the Dallas Morning News. “They’d say ‘This guy must be illegal. He can’t be getting open like that and catching all those balls, running through the secondary like that without getting touched.’”
Pearson’s point is that he played at a time when receivers could be mugged, repeatedly, until the ball was in the air. This necessarily resulted in fewer passes.
“The game was back then you throw 20-25 games, and that was pretty much it,” Pearson said. “I led the NFC in receiving in 1976 with 58 catches, so we didn’t throw the ball much. But with the rules nowadays there’s no question the numbers would have been different because the strategies and game plans and attacking defenses would have been different from what we did back in the day.”
Pearson, whose most famous catch was marred by claims of offensive pass interference, realizes that the changes to the game have generated statistical performances that will make it harder for Pearson to ever get to Canton.
“When I look at these guys going into the Hall of Fame, I look at these numbers they put up, and I was, ‘Wow. I’ll never get in,’” Pearson said. “Some of those numbers triple my accomplishments, the receiving yardage and touchdown numbers that I put up. You wonder if that is something that now is the criteria, the quantity of catches as opposed the quality. The catches I made were quality catches. I only had 489 in 11 years, but I averaged 16 yards a catch. So let’s define greatness by the eras that these individuals play in.”
Pearson is currently 96th on the all-time receiving yardage list, with 7,822 yards. He has more career yards than Hall of Famer Bob Hayes (7,414), Elroy Hirsch (7,029), and Lynn Swann (5,462). But Pearson likely will get in only if the Seniors Committee makes him one of its annual selections.
