25 best Offensive Rookie of the Year winners ranked by playing career

25 best Offensive Rookie of the Year winners ranked by playing career: 10. Clinton Portis – Denver Broncos

Spoiler alert: 8 of the top 10 players on this list are running backs. They dominated this list, but they dominated the top ten even more. Clinton Portis is one of the best running backs of his era, and his era was really good at the ground game. Portis started out with the Denver Broncos, a team with a very long legacy of great rushers who were used confusingly. Thanks, Mike Shanahan.

He put up back-to-back 1,500-yard seasons to start his career with the Broncos. Then he was traded in one of the biggest one-for-one trades in the history of the NFL. The Broncos sent him to Washington for Champ Bailey. He didn’t slow down too much in the nation’s capital, rushing for north of 1,200 yards four more times for the rest of his career.

Portis did all this despite having rough relationships with coaches, including Jim Zorn who famously kept putting him on ice at the end of games. Portis would only play until he was 29 years old when he retired from the game.

His legacy is complicated now because when you Google Portis’s name, headlines don’t show a famous rushing career. His alleged health care scheme against the league comes up. There are definitely worse crimes against former players, but Portis does have to know this hurts his legacy as an NFL legend. It doesn’t take away from what he did on the field, as he was one of the best in the league for close to a decade.