Keith DeLong Madden Career 1992-1994 - Peak 69 OVR

Keith DeLong came from football blood. His father, Steve DeLong, had won the Outland Trophy at Tennessee and made the College Football Hall of Fame, and Keith followed him to Knoxville and became a first-team All-American linebacker in 1988. San Francisco took him in the first round, 28th overall, in 1989, and he won a Super Bowl ring as a rookie on the XXIV team.

Madden rated him a steady, middling starter and never moved off it: a 69 for the 1991 season, a 69 again for 1992, then a slip to a 62 for 1993. The flat line was about right for a competent middle linebacker who started without ever making a Pro Bowl, but it also never got the chance to become anything more. DeLong's career was short. He started 39 games across five seasons and was done after 1993, before he turned 27, his body giving out early the way a linebacker's sometimes does.

A first-round pick and a rookie champion with a famous football name, DeLong was on his way to a solid career before it closed prematurely. Madden's three cards of him, two 69s and a 62, are the record of a starter who was good, briefly, and then gone.