Simeon Rice and His Case for the Hall of Fame

For close to a decade, Simeon Rice was the most dominant pass rusher in the NFL. That's not just a historical account of Rice's ascendent play in the late '90s and early '00s, it is literally a working definition of a Pro Football Hall of Fame defensive end.

From 1998 through 2005, a span of eight seasons, Rice led the NFL with 101.5 sacks, four more than New York Giants defensive end Michael Strahan who was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2014, in his second year of eligibility. Simeon Rice has now been eligible for the Hall of Fame for twelve years.

Strahan also had 101.0 sacks over the eight-year span from 1996 through 2003.

Since the sack became an official NFL statistic in 1982 and since then there have been 36 distinct eight-year spans, from 1982-89 to 2017-24. Every single pl