Now that the 2025 NFL season is underway, let’s take another look at where our Heisman winners in the league stand among the game’s all-time greats. A stat(us) check if you will.
There are four Heisman Trophy winners inside the Top 20 of the NFL’s career rushing cart. The first three are the long retired Barry Sanders, Tony Dorsett and Marcus Allen.
The fourth is 2015 Heisman winner Derrick Henry, who is the NFL’s active-leading career rusher at 11,592 yards, good for 18th all time. In fact, there is currently no NFL player remotely close to Henry on the active rushing career list. The two nearest active running backs on the career list are Joe Mixon (60th, 7,428) and Saquon Barkley (64th, 7,276).
There is one other active Heisman winner in the NFL’s top 100 all-time rushers, and that’s Henry’s quarterback teammate Lamar Jackson, who has 6,243 career yards.
And for those asking, yes, Jackson is the NFL’s current all-time leading rusher among QBs, having passed Michael Vick late last season.
Pivoting back to Henry, the 10-year NFL veteran, presuming he plays a full season, is likely to crack the league’s top 10 rushing chart in 2025 and become the second-leading all-time Heisman runner.
He trails Allen (12,243), who is 14th overall, by 651 yards and is 1,147 yards behind Dorsett (12,739), who sits 10th. Sanders’ standing as the Heisman’s all-time NFL rushing leader is safe for now. He is fourth all-time among NFL running backs with 15,269 yards.
Tampa Bay’s Baker Mayfield leads active NFL Heisman quarterbacks in passing yards with 24,999, 83rd on the league’s all-time list. Jameis Winston, a backup for the New York Giants, has 24,225 passing yards while Jackson has 20,268 and should crack the NFL’s top 100 later this season.
Kyler Murray has 19,661 career passing yards while Joe Burrow has 19,114, both poised to join the NFL’s 20K passing club in the coming weeks.
Mayfield’s 174 career TD passes — good for 70th overall on the NFL’s all-time list — is also a current-Heisman best although Jackson is close with 168. Winston has 154, Burrow has 141 and Murray has 129.
Who is the Heisman winner with the most career passing touchdowns you ask? Why that would be 2003 USC winner Carson Palmer, who is 15th overall in league history with 294 scoring aerials. Vinny Testaverde is behind him at 19th overall with 275. The next closest is Cam Newton, 60th overall with 194.
Tim Brown is the Heisman leader in all-time NFL receptions (seventh, 1,094), receiving touchdowns (tied for 11th, 100) and receiving yards (seventh, 14,934) — and those are marks that will stand for awhile.
Allen is the next closest Heisman among receptions with 587 receptions.
Fifth-year Philadelphia Eagle DeVonta Smith has 311 career receptions for 4,027 receiving yards and 27 scoring receptions.Travis Hunter is one game into his career and needs a year, two or three to make a dent in the charts.
So we’ll need to check back in a decade or so to see if Brown’s records are in jeopardy.