06-17-2021, 11:50 PM
(06-17-2021, 06:12 PM)BacknDaDey Wrote: I was fortunate enough to have seen Curtis several times in person. Our family would go to Wilmington College for training camp every year and also attend one or two regular season games in the 70's. Curtis is still my mother's favorite all time Bengal. I'm saying all this because I watched DB's do everything they could legal and illegally to throw Curtis off his routes. Even during training camp. Holding and going for the knees wasn't called like it is today. A flag for hitting pass 5 or 10 yds was unheard of.
Also did you take a look at Ken Anderson's stats then. He wasn't hitting 2,500 yds too much in Curtis's prime. The Bengals was a 3 to 4 yds and a cloud of dust running team back then. Curtis receiving yards was probably close to one third of Anderson's total yards passing for the season the 1st 7 years or so (that's a guess). And when Collinsworth got there, teams still focused so hard on Curtis that it helped Collinsworth excel.
Curtis was so good and dangerous, think about this, they made the rule for a receiver that couldn't put up the stats because they were literally mugging him on the field. They said he had world class speed.
In a separate post, Wes did list off his rankings in yardage for his prime. He didn't dominate his peers like Chad did, and was arguably worse than Green as well...and that's just yardage. Rankings are what caused me to have this opinion on Curtis. He didn't really dominate when compared to his peers...who obviously played in the same era with the same limitations.
That's all I'll say on this though. Curtis was great, just not great enough to be in the "best WR in franchise history" convo. I have him down with Collinsworth, Pickens and Eddie Brown...which isn't an insult by any stretch.
The training, nutrition, medicine, fitness, playbooks and rules evolve. The athlete does not.
