Arkush: Who are the greatest players of the NFL's modern era?
Imagine playing on your high school freshman football team in the '60s, when the old AFL and NFL agreed to merge, beginning the modern era of the NFL and finding out your dad is leaving his job to launch a newsmagazine devoted exclusively to professional football, the nation's first.
Imagine leaving the University of Michigan a decade later to join your Dad at Pro Football Weekly, only to have him pass away suddenly and unexpectedly two years after that, and in your mid twenties realize you're the Publisher of America's largest pro football publication.
Think about spending the next forty years living out your Dad's dream following, covering and in some cases befriending some of the greatest players in history.
I have been blessed in all those ways, and with the completion of the upcoming NFL draft, we'll be wrapping up the 50th anniversary of Pro Football Weekly.
A golden anniversary needs to be celebrated, and one that's shadowed the growth of the NFL from Major League Baseball's poor stepchild to the biggest and most successful sports entertainment in the world screams that the modern era of the game needs to be celebrated as well.
But how?
Our thought was to build the greatest team of the NFL's modern era, allow fans of America's favorite sport to participate and then award great prizes to some of those fans.
Monday, Pro Football Weekly launched its "Team For The Ages" contest to honor the greatest team of the modern era of professional football.
Millions of fans from around the world are invited to join us at ProFootballWeekly.com, click on the "Team For The Ages" icon and begin the extremely entertaining and surprisingly difficult process of picking their own "Team For The Ages."
You'll build your team just like an NFL roster: three quarterbacks, four running backs, five wideouts, etc., until you've formed a complete offense, defense and special teams with one head coach.
Of course we had to come up with some criteria to define your "draft class." We believed a completely subjective process was important, so we went back and checked every player who's been named a Pro Football Weekly All-Pro and discovered there were 723 honorees, but that felt just a bit unwieldy.
So we sorted how many players had been PFW All-Pros at least twice, and were surprised to discover exactly 300 players, making that our list of nominees.
At the contest site you will find a pull-down screen for each position group with the nominees, a listing of each one's significant accomplishments with a short bio and the specific guidelines for building your team.
Just reading all the bios is more than worth the visit!
What we've already learned is you are likely to be stunned by how difficult some of your choices will be, how much fun it will be to make them and debate with your friends and how shocked you will be by some of the true greats that didn't even make the cut.
For a little extra juice, one lucky fan will win an all-expenses-paid trip for two to the 53rd title game, played next February at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta, and there are dozens of other great prizes as well.
We've also put together a panel of former coaches, scouts, players and some of the greatest pro football writers of the era to select our final team, which will be unveiled later this summer leading up to Week One of the 2018 season, and for you to compare and see just how good a job you did.
If the NFL is your favorite game, this is an opportunity you can't afford to miss.
We wanted to find a way to honor all the incredible players who excelled above and beyond the rest, and to say thanks to each of you for giving us the great privilege of 50 years of covering it.
Check out "Team For The Ages" at ProFootballWeekly.com, and we're confident you'll agree we've found the perfect answer.
• Hub Arkush, the executive editor of Pro Football Weekly, can be reached at harkush@profootballweekly.com or on Twitter @Hub_Arkush.