Green Bay Packers: Ranking the top five draft picks of all-time
Forrest Gregg: Third best all-time draft pick by the Green Bay Packers
Durability, excellence and pure athletic abilities were the keystones to a hall of fame career put in by Forrest Gregg.
Being described by head coach Vince Lombardi as the greatest player he ever coached was probably good enough, but Gregg backed up those words with action.
Gregg didn’t miss a game over the course of 14 years while playing for the Green Bay Packers.
He was selected in the second round, 20th overall, of the 1956 NFL Draft and went on to play 15 seasons, his last at age 38 with the Dallas Cowboys.
Here is how author John Maxymuk describes Gregg:
"He wasn’t just tough and durable, though, he was a great lineman. He played most of his career at tackle, but moved over to guard in 1961 when Jerry Kramer broke his leg, and he made All Pro there, too. In his career he was named All Pro nine times (each year Lombardi coached) and went to nine Pro Bowls (as a tackle, that’s been surpassed only by Anthony Munoz‘s 11 Pro Bowl appearances – a player Gregg himself drafted when he was coach of the Cincinnati Bengals). He won five championships and two Super Bowls with the Packers and then spent his last year in Dallas earning another ring as a substitute on Tom Landry‘s Cowboys. He went right into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1977. Lombardi said of him, ‘He’s a fine downfield blocker, too. His speed isn’t great, but he’s very quick off that ball and he has that mental sharpness to adjust quickly to sudden situations. He has that knack of getting in front of the runner and, with his excellent sense of timing, of making the key block.’"
Another of the Packers who were inducted into the Hall of Fame, Gregg was certainly one of the top five draft picks ever by the franchise.
Gregg’s career statistics, courtesy of profootballreference.com: