The list of the best NFL players without a Super Bowl ring landed this morning, and it opens with Dan Marino. Of course it does. There is no other honest way to start it.
Marino got to the mountain early and never got back. His second season, 1984, he threw for 5,084 yards and 48 touchdowns, numbers so far out in front of the era that they sat on the books untouched for years. That season ended in Super Bowl XIX against the 49ers, and San Francisco took him apart 38-16. Marino played seventeen seasons in Miami. Seventeen. He never played in another one.
That is the whole cruelty of this exercise, and it is also why the exercise is worth doing. Greatness and hardware run on two separate clocks, and the clocks do not consult each other. Bruce Smith retired with 200 sacks, more than any man who ever played, and four straight Super Bowl losses on his resume. Jim Kelly, Thurman Thomas and Andre Reed were standing right next to him for all four of them. Fran Tarkenton went to three Super Bowls with Minnesota and lost all three. Dan Fouts never reached one at all.
And then there is Barry Sanders, who ran for 2,053 yards in 1997 and walked away at thirty with the all-time rushing record sitting there in plain sight, unbothered. Larry Fitzgerald put up 127 yards and two touchdowns in Super Bowl XLIII and lost anyway, capping a postseason where he piled up 546 receiving yards in four games. Nobody has ever played a better January and gotten less for it.
checked the almanac: the Bills went to four consecutive Super Bowls after the 1990 through 1993 seasons and lost every one. Nobody has matched that run of sustained excellence since, and nobody would want it on those terms.
What comes next is the part that keeps a list like this alive. Every season a few names play their way onto it and one or two play their way off. Ask any of these men and they will tell you the ring is the only thing missing. Ask anybody who watched them and the ring is the only thing they would change.