Bears coach Matt Nagy was born seven years after Gale Sayers last carried a football in 1971. But he’s seen the highlights.
“You could just see that he could tell what he was going to do before the defender knew what he was going to do,“ he said about Sayers, who died Wednesday at 77. “And [he] just had a lot of nice, long runs. It was just pretty, pretty to watch.”
Nagy and receiver Allen Robinson both met Sayers at the Bears’ 100th-year celebration in June 2019. Sayers, who battled dementia for years, attended but was in ill health. Robinson watched film of him again Wednesday, and noticed how well he would have fit today’s speed-based game.
“He was a heck of a player, just seeing how he ran the ball,” he said.
Falcons coach Dan Quinn was a baby when Sayers retired but grew up hearing about him. Both his parents went to Northwestern, and his dad grew up in Evanston.
“I think I can really remember just [him] describing, ‘How do you tackle this guy?’” said Quinn, the youngest of six kids and the only one not born in the Chicago area. “He was so hard to tackle because he could make you miss with speed, he could make you miss with change of direction. Those things, if you’re a real football historian or a football junkie like a lot of us, it’s seeing those kinds of plays where he just looked like he was moving so much faster than everybody else. …
“Comparing different eras are hard. But no matter who you’re playing against, when you’re moving that much faster than everybody else, it’s such a unique thing. …
“Whether Gale Sayers played 55 years ago or 25 years from now, I have to think he’d be kicking [butt] and doing it in a lot of the same fashion.”
