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Bad Take Tuesday: Legacies shouldn't be debated via time travel

by:RT Young•about 9 hours
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Marquise Goodwin (Will Gallagher/Inside Texas)

Using how well a player would have fared in another era to judge their legacy is a waste of time.

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Bill Simmons and Ryen Russillo spent a good portion of Sunday’s Bill Simmons Podcast discussing how Celtics legend Bill Russell would have fared in the modern NBA. Would Russell’s height, which is on par with a modern wing, be seen as a negative? How would No. 6 have performed with an updated training regimen, 21st-century nutrition, and better sneakers? What about just better teammates?

To all that I say: Who cares?

The measure of dominance isn’t how well an athlete would have fared in a different era. It’s how much better they were than their peers.

It does the opiner no good to legislate whether Tommy Nobis’ foot speed could have kept up in today’s game, if Steve McMichael would have started on an SEC defensive line in 2025, or if Eric Metcalf could have run into the teeth of a Kirby Smart defense. You judge the legacies of greats by how high their greatness stretched. How much better were Vince Young, Ricky Williams, and Earl Campbell than their peers? Infinitely. So quit all your guessing about how effective Bobby Layne would have been in a modern offense. Really good. Joe Burrow might even be the gunslinger reincarnated. But that’s beside the point. Did the Blond Bomber outperform his competition by lengths and bounds? Yes. Then there you go.

But what’s a Bad Take without a little hypocrisy?

So let’s see A.J. Abrams in a modern three-point shooting offense.

Derrick Johnson in an era where the 4-3 isn’t gospel across college defenses.

How about Marquise Goodwin at a time when talent evaluators and play-callers aren’t such size queens and put more of an emphasis on space and speed?

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Stop it. Those are worthless exercises, baseless experiments, bad takes.

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