Cris Carter will receive his snappy, yellow jacket tomorrow evening. He'll be presented and officially inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame on Saturday. The Flea Flicker will be there.
Jerry Rice was the best receiver to play the game. Cris Carter was the best pass catcher that I've ever seen. The supposed simple act of catching a football. No one did it better than Carter. There were other terrific aspects to his game. His feet. Getting open. Positioning. He did so many things well. Any receiving hopeful would be greatly assisted by watching how Cris Carter played the game.
Those hands. I can't recall him ever dropping a pass. It was so rare an occurrence that a drop would be quite memorable. I can't remember one. It's shocking to see the number of receivers that take the supposed simple act of catching a football for granted. Cris Carter never did. He never stopped working on his pass catching. His football workouts were legendary. Working his hands was always part of them. He took care of those hands too. Keeping them soft. Keeping them pretty. It's been said somewhere. Can't remember where. "He took care of the hands that took care of him."
I was in the Candlestick stands for one of the best examples of Cris Carter's game. A Monday Night game. Dec. 18, 1995. The San Francisco 49ers were one of the dominant teams in the league. The Minnesota Vikings were a frequent one-and-done playoff team. The 49ers jumped all over the Vikings early. Jerry Rice was pretty much unstoppable. No surprise there. Before the first half was over, Carter started pushing and pulling his team back into the game. It's quite remarkable to see a receiver to put a team on his back and carry it. Carter did that this night. For a fan of receivers, this game was amazing. It turned into a duel between Jerry Rice and Cris Carter. It was simply beautiful. In the days before the fantasy football revolution, in-game stats weren't paraded around a stadium. People attending an NFL game in the '90s were mostly in the dark as to how "their players" were performing. It felt like Carter and Rice were putting up similar numbers. One would match what the other did. I figured that each future Hall of Fame receiver had about 10 catches for over 150 yards. I was fairly shocked to see this in the paper the following morning:
Carter 12-88yds and 2 TDs
Rice 14-289yds and 3 TDs
Rice even had one carry for another 10 yards. He was a yard short of 300 total yards! This was the best statistical game for the best receiver the game has ever seen. It wasn't so much that Rice's game was so outrageous that surprised me. It was how pedestrian Carter's game looked on paper. I learned then that Cris Carter had to be seen to be properly appreciated. I also think that this why it took Carter six years longer than it should have to make it to Canton. The Hall of Fame voters rely too heavily on stats. Carter has the stats for Canton but his game has always been better than his stats. 12 catches for 88 yards doesn't open a lot of eyes. What Carter did with those catches can open eyes. He moved the chains. He scored touchdowns. He carried his team down the field. All of his 88 yards were important yards. That's not to say that there are unimportant yards. It's just that sometimes a 4-yard reception for a first down, during a critical drive, is sometimes as important as a 30-yard gain. That night, it felt like Carter and Rice had similar games. The 49ers won the game, 37-30. It was quite a game after Carter pulled the Vikings back from a 21-0 first quarter deficit.
There are football players that make each generation a special time to be a football fan. I'd love to have seen Red Grange run, Dutch Clark lead, Don Hutson play, Sammy Baugh pass, Deacon Jones rush, Jim Brown and Gale Sayers carry the ball. I'd love to have seen the greats from generations past. Lawrence Taylor, Joe Montana, Jerry Rice, Barry Sanders, and Ed Reed are just a few that have made my generation special. Cris Carter is in that group. He helped make his generation of football great. No one caught the ball better. It was a true honor to watch Cris Carter play football. That honor continues on Saturday when he finds his home with the best.
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