Derrick Lassic Madden Career Madden NFL 1994 - Peak 53 OVR

Derrick Lassic had one of the most dramatic rookie debuts a role player ever gets. The Sugar Bowl MVP on Alabama's 1992 national championship team, a fourth-round pick of the Cowboys in 1993, he was thrust into the starting lineup as a rookie when Emmitt Smith held out to open the season, carrying the load for the defending champions until the star returned.

Madden has exactly one card of him, a 53 for the 1993 season, the modest grade of a backup running back on the old scale, and it is the only rating he ever received. His career did not last long enough to earn another.

Lassic won a Super Bowl XXVIII ring that year, then tore a quad in the 1994 preseason and was never a factor again, bouncing to Carolina, San Francisco and eventually the CFL. He finished with 269 rushing yards, essentially all of them in that one rookie fill-in stretch. He is the answer to a trivia question, the rookie who started for the Cowboys while Emmitt sat, and Madden's lone 53 is the whole of what the game made of a career that flared briefly and went out.