Randy Moss and the 10 Biggest Quitters in NFL History

Stop me if you've heard this before, but Randy Moss isn't very interested in playing football right now. In fact, he isn't very interested in playing football ever again.

Yes sir, Moss called it a career on Monday. Because Moss is still just 34, he could have played for a few more years. However, his first time on the open free agent market wasn't proving to be very fruitful as far as offers go. Instead of biding his time and waiting for a reasonable offer to come along, Moss decided to leave the game altogether.

So ends the career of one of the greatest receivers in NFL history. And in many ways, the fact that Moss walked away with so much gas still left in his tank is oddly fitting. He quit, plain and simple. A fitting end to a career that saw Moss quit all too often.

But hey, Moss isn't the only one. As much as I or anyone else hates to admit it, NFL history is fair-teeming with quitters. Like Moss, some of them quit on their careers before they were truly over. Others quit on their teams in desperate hours. Others just plain quit on themselves.

For good or ill, this list is dedicated to these poor souls. Without further adieu, I present to you the 10 biggest quitters in NFL history.

10. Jim Brown

I have a sneaking suspicion that I'll never hear the end of it for including Jim Brown on this list, but I'm going to go ahead and justify his placement anyway.

As has been said many, many times before, Jim Brown is probably the greatest football player to ever live. In just eight seasons, he racked up 12,312 rushing yards, a figure that is still good enough for ninth all-time. His 106 rushing touchdowns are good for fifth. If they kept records for bruises given, his record would be unbreakable.

But still, he only played eight years. Instead of continuing his domination on the gridiron, the 30-year-old Brown decided to take his talents to Hollywood.

If a player did that today... man. Talk about never hearing the end of it.

But as you can tell by his low placement on this list, I don't hold Brown's, ahem, early retirement against him.

There are two reasons why I don't. The first is that Brown retired 32 years before I was born. The second is that some of the movies he made are freaking awesome.

9. Robert Smith

Generally speaking, when we talk about athletes who retired "on top of the world," we're talking about guys like John Elway, who called it quits at the age of 38 after winning two straight Super Bowls.

Then there are the Tier 2 guys, among whom former Minnesota Vikings running back Robert Smith fairly stands out.

As you might remember, Smith called it a career in 1998 after rushing for just under 7,000 yards in eight seasons. A football layman might deduce that his career was cut short due to injury.

Nope. Smith was in perfect health at the time, and he was only 28 years old to boot. Moreover, he was coming off his best season as a pro, as he rushed for a career-high 1,521 yards and seven touchdowns. Apparently, he just felt that his work in the NFL was finished.

Since retiring, Smith has carved out a nice career for himself on television, primarily as a mediocre ESPN analyst.

Indeed, the phrase itself is redundant.

8. Carson Palmer

Oh, Carson Palmer. You were in the league for seven years, yet we hardly knew ye. Perhaps we would have had you chosen to stick around a little while longer.

As all of us well know, that is not going to happen. After toughing it out with the Cincinnati Bengals for so many years, it's looking like 2010 was Palmer's NFL swan song. After the season, his message to Bengals owner Mike Brown was clear: trade me or watch me retire.

Brown chose the latter. While he could have chosen to deal Palmer for the good of his franchise, the only thing that matters to Brown is being right.

That's partially what makes Palmer a somewhat sympathetic addition to this list. Despite the fact I've never had the pleasure, I can understand why Palmer was sick of playing for the Bengals.

But hey, that doesn't mean he's right.

7. Terrell Owens

You want a good football debate? Ask who the better wide receiver is: Terrell Owens or Randy Moss.

You want a better debate? Ask which of them is the bigger quitter.

Let's start with Owens. Like Moss, he's right up at the top of many of the NFL's receiving records. Also like Moss, Owens will go down as one of the greatest receivers to ever play the game.

He will also go down as the biggest diva in NFL history, if not sports history.

There are plenty of examples we can think of, but we should probably keep this relevant. For that, we need to go back to 2005. Owens was with the Philadelphia Eagles at the time, and his season got off to a very good start, but he made sure it didn't last for long. After heavily criticizing Donovan McNabb for basically being a wuss, Owens was suspended for conduct detrimental to the team. After the suspension was over, Owens was deactivated. For some reason, he and his agent, Drew Rosenhaus, then proceeded to make asses of themselves on Owens' front yard.

If you wanted to, you could argue that this is not technically quitting, and that in fact nothing Owens has done during his career should earn him the label of "quitter."

Maybe so. All I can say is that Owens wasn't exactly at his best every time the going got tough. In fact, these moments usually made Owens shrink and whine. One time, he even cried.

If that's not quitting, it's pretty damn close.

6. Tiki Barber

If a college student were to do a research paper on quitters and quitting, former New York Giants running back Tiki Barber would make for a fascinating case study.

Let's start with Barber's football career. After struggling to find his way early on in his career, Barber developed into one of the most consistent running backs in the league. Between 2000 and 2006, Barber had just one season in which he rushed for under 1,000 yards.

But after the '06 season, Barber had seen enough. At the age of 31, he retired. Soon after, he started running his mouth about Eli Manning. In 2008, Manning and the Giants won the Super Bowl, and Barber's gig as a TV analyst forced him to come face-to-face with the fact that a) he had missed out and b) he was wrong about Manning.

Fast-forward three years, and both Barber's personal life and career are in shambles. As a result, he's trying to make a comeback in football, the very game that he says takes too much of a toll on one's body. For the record, he is 36.

You can probably understand Barber's decision to call it quits in 2006. But now that he's back, you might say he's quitting on quitting.

Like I said, fascinating.

5. Albert Haynesworth

How is Albert Haynesworth guilty of quitting, you ask?

My goodness, let us count the ways.

The first phase of Haynesworth's career with the Tennessee Titans was actually noticeably devoid of quitting. Haynesworth did, however, grab headlines by doing things like stomping on an opponent's head, kicking a teammate, and just generally acting like a bad seed.

But Haynesworth was just getting started. After signing with the Washington Redskins in 2009 for a ridiculous $100 million, Haynesworth proceeded to earn nary a penny of his contract. He drastically underachieved in his first season with the team, and then showed up to camp in 2010 in horrible shape. He couldn't even pass a conditioning test that has since become legendary for its ease.

But it wasn't until well into the season that Haynesworth hit rock bottom. In the midst of a horrible blowout by the Philadelphia Eagles on Monday Night Football, Haynesworth hit the deck late in the game. He then stayed there, embarrassing both himself and the Redskins.

Shortly after that, Haynesworth was suspended for the rest of the season, and spent much of his offseason getting in trouble with the law. Last week, he was traded to the New England Patriots. If he quits on them, his career is over.

4. JaMarcus Russell

He was only in the league for three years, but former Oakland Raiders quarterback JaMarcus Russell is going to forever be one of the most despised players in the history of the NFL.

This is not so much because of something Russell did, mind you. Quite the contrary, in fact. It's for all the things he never did.

Russell's career was a disaster pretty much as soon as it got started. He was selected with the No. 1 overall pick in 2007, yet decided to hold out. He didn't sign until well into the '07 season, and only ended up playing in four games by the time all was said and done.

The next year, Russell showed up to camp out of shape, and he failed to show any improvement at any point in camp or in the preseason. This trend continued on into the regular season, and into the next season as well. The freakishly strong arm was there, but it came with absolutely nothing else.

By 2010, the Raiders had seen enough. They chose to release Russell, and he has been unemployed ever since.

Russell has tried to keep his football career alive, but he hasn't done a very good job of it. He's gotten busted for codeine possession, spent all his money, and even alienated his so-called "life coach," John Lucas. At this point, whatever prospects he had are long gone.

Did Russell quit on football? Sure, but that's not the worst part. No sir, that's that Russell seems to have quit on life.

3. Randy Moss

We come at last to the man of the hour.

If there is one good thing to be said about Randy Moss' career, it's that he definitely did enough to show all those teams that passed on him in the 1998 draft just how dumb they were. Instead of succumbing to the bright lights, he came, he saw, and he kicked ass.

Unfortunately, Moss didn't spend the entirety of his career in Beast Mode. Relative to his peers, he spent quite a bit of his career in Sleep Mode.

Like Moss himself once said, he played when he wanted to play. He showed as much at times during his first stint with the Minnesota Vikings. And as an Oakland Raiders fan, I can tell you definitively that he did not want to play in Oakland. He was pretty good with the Patriots during his time in New England, but things unraveled early on in 2010. Thus began Moss' Magical Mystery Tour through Minnesota and Tennessee. It ended today with his retirement.

Nobody can argue that Moss accomplished a lot during his career. He is fifth all-time in receiving yards with 14,858, and tied for second (with Owens) in receiving touchdowns with 153. Not too shabby.

But alas, the tragedy of Moss' career will forever be what he could have done had he played all the time, instead of merely when he wanted to.

2. Ricky Williams

Thanks in large part to the excellent 30 for 30 documentary "Run, Ricky, Run," most of us know Ricky Williams as a kind, gentle, and essentially misunderstood man who just isn't cut out for the limelight.

Once upon a time, though, Williams was arguably the biggest quitter in NFL history.

If your memory escapes you, that time was the summer of 2004. Williams was fresh off a season in which he'd rushed for over 1,300 yards with the Miami Dolphins, but rumors started to circulate that he had failed yet another drug test.

Instead of facing the music, Williams announced his retirement. While the Dolphins floundered their way to a 4-12 record the ensuing season, Williams was traveling the world and pursuing his hobbies. Because his hobbies were know to include copious amounts of marijuana and holistic medicine studies, it went without saying that people were pretty outraged.

Many of us have come to forgive Williams since then, but there's no escaping the fact that his career will forever be defined by that one time he quit on the game so he could pretend he was George Harrison.

1. Barry Sanders

Believe me, it is with great reluctance that I include Barry Sanders on this list, much less at No. 1. For my money, he is the greatest running back to ever play the game. There has never been another like him, and there never will be.

Now that I've introduced Sanders, let's be honest about him. When he walked away from football after the 1998 season, he quit. No bones about it.

Yes, you can argue that Sanders had given the Detroit Lions more of his time than they deserved. That much is true. And to his credit, Sanders made no effort to hide the fact that he was walking away because he just couldn't stand losing anymore.

At the same time, the Lions did have the makings of a good team when Sanders retired, and he still had a couple of good years left in him. Yet he quit anyway, and he did it by fixing a letter to a small newspaper in his home town.

Kinda like the Giants and Barber, the Lions proceeded to have a successful season after Sanders left seemingly just to spite him. It was a real "Take that!" season, and Sanders deserved it.

For a few years, most of us kept the hope alive that Sanders would come back. But he never did. When he quit, he quit for good.