Top Team of 1930s | 1940s | 1950s | 1960s | 1970s | 1980s | 1990s
Team with 4th Highest # Pros | Third Highest Team | Second Highest Team
Team with Most NFL Players
I recently did some research to answer this question:
Which LSU team sent the most players to the pro ranks?
To answer, I set up an Excel spreadsheet and entered two sets of data, both of which I obtained primarily from the LSU Football Media Guide:
During the course of completing the project, I determined that the list of Tigers in the Pros in the Media Guide is missing quite a few names. I sent my completed spreadsheet to the LSU Sports Information Office. It was too late to affect the 2010 Guide (a copy of which I requested as "payment" for my efforts) but may have an impact in the future.
Update: I rec'd this e-mail:
Great stuff Neal. Thanks for your emails, very helpful. When we get the media guides in, I will mail you one. Bill Martin Associate Sports Information Director LSU Athletics [Follow up: He actually sent me two guides. Thanks, Bill!]
With that preliminary out of the way, I will start revealing what I learned. First, I'm not going to give you the answer to my question above for awhile. I want to keep you coming back for more. So I'll build up week-by-week by going through the top LSU teams in supplying pro players decade-by-decade, then start revealing the top five teams culminating with #1. I will say that you won't be surprised by the squad that "won" the competition, although it was closer than you might think. And one of the top five teams played over 20 years ago.
So let's start with this question:
Who was the first LSU player to participate in pro football?
Amazingly, the answer takes us back to 1920 and a player named Tom Henry, who, according to pro-football-reference.com, played one game at WB for the Rhode Island (IL) Independents of the American Professional Football Association. Mind you, this was one year before the NFL started! Tom had lettered at LSU in 1916. (Sidebar: I decided to list only lettermen in my spreadsheet, my reasoning being that, if someone was on a Tiger team but didn't play enough to letter, I didn't want him contaminating my compilation of players that team sent to the pros. Plus, it would be almost impossible to find out who were the squadmen on each team in the bygone era in order to include them in the count.)
The very next year, 1921, a second LSU-ex joined the pro ranks. He was Joe Bernstein, who lettered in 1915-16-19. (He may have missed 1917-18 because of World War I.) A huge FB for that era – 190 – Joe played for the New York Giants in 1921 and in 1923-24 for those same Rhode Island Independents, who had now joined the fledgling NFL.
Henry and Bernstein were the only Tigers in the pros in the 1920s. We have to jump to the late 30s before we find Tiger teams with multiple players who turned pro. So we'll pick up our Best of the Decade list with the top team from the 1930s.
Best of the 1930s in Supplying Pro Players:
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 Bernie Moore, LSU coach 1935-47
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The '36 Bengals were a close second to their predecessors with 7 future pros, most of whom were carryovers from '35. With the NFL comprising only 10 teams in those years with rosters typically numbering 20-25, 7 or 8 pros from one team was quite remarkable.
How did these two pro-laden Tiger teams do on the gridiron? Quite well, as you'd expect.
1935: 9-1 regular season, then lost the Sugar Bowl to TCU 3-2.
1936: 8-1-1 regular season, then lost to Santa Clara in the Sugar Bowl, 21-14.To put this is perspective, the 8 future pros of the '35 team were two more than the 1958 National Championship team and tied with the 1959 squad.
