BroBible
With football season picking up, here we are counting down the 25 coolest football guys of the 1980s.
It was a golden era for the NFL full of quarterbacks with effortless style and running backs with swagger. Defensive stars throughout the league were some of the most feared men on planet earth with muscles the size of Mt. Rushmore. Mustaches were rampant in the best of ways.
While there are certainly dozens of NFL stars from the 1980s that could make the cut, we had to whittle it down to 25 for this list…
First up! The same man featured at the top of this article.
A member of the College and Professional Football Halls of Fame, Eric Dickerson went from being an SMU legend to the NFL Rookie of the Year. He led the league in rushing in 4 seasons and looked as stylish as humanly possible along the way.
Dickerson wore his iconic goggles due to myopia and made them look better than anyone else in the game. One of the all time greats, he has been voted one of the 100 best NFL players of all time. All that and he had endless drip.
As far as I’m concerned, Bo Jackson was the coolest athlete in any sport during that era. Vincent Edward “Bo” Jackson had every kid in America repeating the phrase “Bo Knows” after the geniuses at Nike cooked up that campaign. And as a multi-sport professional athlete, he embodied everything every kid dreaming of the future could imagine.
Then there are the Bo Jackson stories. His 30 for 30 is WILD. There is quite literally nothing Bo Jackson couldn’t do.
A member of the ‘Big Blue Wrecking Crew,’ 2-time Super Bowl champion Lawrence Taylor had more swagger than 99.9% of the guys on the field in his day. The 1986 NFL MVP would later defeat Bam Bam Bigelow in the WrestleMania XI main event.
He appeared in Oliver Stone’s Any Given Sunday, The Sopranos, The Waterboy and for a while was a fixture in pop culture until his arrest in 2010 and subsequent fall from grace in the public eye.
John Elway, one of the greatest NFL quarterbacks of all time, was starting to emerge as that dude in the 1980s.
Elway made the NFL Pro Bowl in 1986, 87, and 89 all while the Denver Broncos were emerging as one of the most popular NFL teams in the country, due in no small part to Starter jackets, and John Elway was the face of that franchise.
Where do you even begin with Walter Payton?! He is one of the 3 greatest running backs of all time. A Super Bowl champion. NFL MVP Award winner. 1977 Man of the Year award winner and they renamed the award after him because he was such an...
