How good was the Eagles' Bill Bradley?
How good was the Eagles' Bill Bradley?
Interesting player...super recruit out of high school, the original wishbone QB while at Texas, regularly punted and returned punts in the NFL, rare (unprecedented?) back-to-back league INT leader, 3 PB/2 AP in the early 70's....but every NFL Films clip I see of him has him getting run over by Ron Johnson or Larry Brown, and those Eagles defenses were pretty terrible as a whole. Was Bill Bradley a deserving of being 1st team All-Pro at FS, or was he an average run supporter whose INT totals were somewhat inflated by his defense constantly being on the field?
Re: How good was the Eagles' Bill Bradley?
Bill Bradley was a very good free safety and a versatile player handling punting duties and punt returns as well. As for run support he was definitely better than Paul Krause. Was he great no but he was above average as a tackler. I think it is also safe to say that from 1971 to 1974 he was the best defensive player the Eagles had until Bill Bergey arrived.
I do remember him being traded to the Vikings in 1977 and he was excited to finally go to a winner but apparently he was unable to beat out Paul Krause of all people. Although Bud Grant was known to stick with "favorite" players well passed their prime so I don't know if that factored into it. The Cardinals signed him 3/4 of the way thru 1977 to fill in due to injuries so he was around for their collapse that year.
On a side note on the highlight comment, growing up I collected the Punt. Pass & Kick books and since 95% of them were about players that played from 1955 to the early 1970's the books on receivers are littered with pics of receivers beating the same Lions DB...........Dick LeBeau. So don't base opinions on highlights or pics.
I do remember him being traded to the Vikings in 1977 and he was excited to finally go to a winner but apparently he was unable to beat out Paul Krause of all people. Although Bud Grant was known to stick with "favorite" players well passed their prime so I don't know if that factored into it. The Cardinals signed him 3/4 of the way thru 1977 to fill in due to injuries so he was around for their collapse that year.
On a side note on the highlight comment, growing up I collected the Punt. Pass & Kick books and since 95% of them were about players that played from 1955 to the early 1970's the books on receivers are littered with pics of receivers beating the same Lions DB...........Dick LeBeau. So don't base opinions on highlights or pics.
Re: How good was the Eagles' Bill Bradley?
It probably did. Look at Fred Cox. In some old games I saw, he wasn't that good of a kicker, but he stayed around a lot longer than he should have.Although Bud Grant was known to stick with "favorite" players well passed their prime so I don't know if that factored into it.