The 150 greatest players in college football's 150-year history - ESPN

That the best player in the history of college football didn't win the Heisman Trophy says less about the player than it does about college football. Jim Brown of Syracuse finished fifth in the vote to select the most outstanding player of 1956. A significant portion of the electorate balked at voting for a black man. Coaches always maintain that the longer a game goes, the more that talent will reveal itself.

The game is made up of more than running backs, but the ability to burst through the line, to plant a foot in one direction and take off in another, has beguiled us from the earliest days of the sport. The blue-ribbon panel of 150 media members, college administrators, and former coaches and players who accepted the responsibility of selecting the best players in the history of the game are suckers for the ball handlers. Nine of the top 10 and 19 of the top 25 are running backs.

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The schools who put the most players on this list are archrivals closing in on the 100th anniversary of their first meeting. Notre Dame and USC each have nine players; Oklahoma, eight; Alabama and Ohio State, seven.

The panel's selections spanned across 111 of the 150 seasons, across 51 colleges and universities. Forgive us for not counting the number of conferences; given the manner in which schools have hopped from league to league, from independent to member, and how leagues have formed and folded, we will defer to someone more gluttonous for punishment.

Approximately two-thirds of the 150 greatest players took the field from the 1960s through the 1990s. It could be that the