Dana Stubblefield Madden Career 1996-2004 - Peak 87 OVR

Dana Stubblefield came out of Kansas as a first-round pick in 1993 and made an immediate impact next to Bryant Young on one of the best defensive lines of the decade. He was the Defensive Rookie of the Year in 1993, won a Super Bowl ring on the 1994 team, and reached his peak in 1997 with a 15-sack season that earned him NFL Defensive Player of the Year.

Madden, oddly, never rated that peak very high. Stubblefield's best overall was an 87, and it came in Madden NFL '99 for the 1998 season, by which point he had left San Francisco for a big free-agent deal in Washington. His actual Defensive Player of the Year season, 1997, is one the game undersold, and his highest number arrived a year later and in another uniform, off the reputation that season built. An 87 for a recent DPOY is the game trailing the player.

He returned to San Francisco in 2001 for a second stint and finished with 53.5 sacks across eleven seasons and three Pro Bowls. Stubblefield was, at his best, a genuinely dominant interior rusher, the disruptive complement to Young's steadiness on those late-dynasty fronts. Madden's grades never quite kept up, high enough to mark a good player but never high enough to catch the one the league once voted its best.