Jerry Rice ran a 4.71 - you think he would be JAG in today's game?
I imagine this was intended as a rhetorical question, but my opinion is yes he would likely be a JAG now due to how much his circumstances made his success and how much those circumstances have changed.
It's always hard to translate players from the past into today's circumstances. Maybe could make better guesses with Fifi, since he played more recently, than wondering how other past greats like Don Hutson, Tom Fears, Crazy Legs Hirsch, Henry Ellard, etc., would fare, but still the speed of defenses has changed incredibly just in the past few years that it's hard to say definitively, even with a player that retired just a decade or even five years ago.
The defensive personnel on rosters is smaller & faster, and the on field scheme has changed from the 4 DBs Rice mostly faced to the norm of 5, 6 or 7 of today. Today's "LBs" have zero relation to a 1980s LB, they would have been strong safeties. This is a huge difference because the square footage of field turf 4 DBs have to account for is exponentially more than when you have 6, and a lightning fast LB filling the slant lane is far different than a plodding LB built to take on hogs and stuff the run.
When the old 49er scheme was a new gimmick it could exploit those gaps in the secondary, and Rice got that benefit that no other WR was getting. Today, every offense runs versions of those old west coast schemes, so Rice would be doing something every WR is doing now instead of having the benefit of that uniqueness.
Thanks to constant rules changes favoring the offense it's taken defenses longer and longer to try to catch up and adjust -- and in fact they still have no good answer to the short pass -- but obviously defenses have transitioned from a mentality of trying to contest every catch to allowing short, harmless completions -- indeed, inviting them.
A quick glance at total league-wide yards after catch (YAC) shows that it's trending down the last 3 years -- which is insane considering that we are witnessing historically best completion percentages. You'd think just by the avalanche of short passes the total would be going up, up, up. But defenses are clearly giving up on trying to prevent short completions or even make interceptions (also at a low point) -- they would rather allow a catch short of the sticks and use exceptional speed to snuff out any YAC.
In other words, defenses are finally built to be exactly what would have been a terrible matchup for the 1980s 49ers. It would be interesting to go back in time and put a smaller, faster, more DB heavy personnel with the philosophy to stop the YAC up against Rice's 49er teams and see the effect. But sadly it never happened because defenses had to be built to try to stop Tony Dorsett, Eric Dickerson, Walter Payton, Barry Sanders and some of the greatest RBs (and offensive lines) to ever play instead.
Anyway, most won't consider any opinion short of Rice being great, end of discussion, and that's fine -- but to me the answer comes down to how much one believes Rice's success was a product of his environment versus his talent, and I tend to think environment was a bigger factor than most are willing to admit, and that environment has changed in today's game.
