From 99-0, TeamFB7 is looking back on the greatest players in NFL history to don each jersey number. No ties allowed, tough decisions will be made — next is No. 96 and Cortez Kennedy.
This is one of the easier calls we’ll have in this series.
Cortez Kennedy was expected to be great when the Seattle Seahawks drafted him No. 3 overall out of Miami in 1990, and that’s exactly what he was for the team over the next 11 years on his way to the Hall of Fame.
After a quiet rookie season adjusting to the NFL, the imposing 6-foot-3, 300-pounds-plus defensive tackle was a force for the next decade while piling up eight Pro Bowl nods, three first-team All-Pro honors (and one second-team selection) and the NFL Defensive Player of the Year award in 1992.
That season, Kennedy posted career-highs with 92 tackles, 14 sacks and 4 forced fumbles and was so dominant he won the voting despite playing for a 2-14 Seattle team.
Interestingly for our purposes here, Kennedy actually wore No. 99 that season — and only that season. He made the temporary switch to honor his friend Jerome Brown, the Philadelphia Eagles star defensive tackle who had died that June in a car accident at the age of 27.
The next season, Kennedy returned to wearing his familiar 96 for the rest of his career.
He was remarkably durable, playing all 16 games in nine of his 11 seasons, playing 15 in another and having only one injury-shortened season when he broke his ankle during the 1997 campaign. That limited him to eight games and would be the only season in a nine-year span in which he wasn’t named to the Pro Bowl.
Kennedy finished with 669 total tackles and 58 sacks in 11 seasons. The NFL didn’t start tracking pass deflections/breakups until 1999, near the end of Kennedy’s career, but he likely would have ranked very high on the all-time list for defensive linemen as he had 15 over his final two seasons.
Simply put, he was a menace up front for opposing quarterbacks and blockers.
Kennedy was elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2012 and his No. 96 was retired by the Seahawks that year.
Tragically, Kennedy died at age 48 in 2017 of congestive heart failure and other causes.
Kennedy is the only true No. 96 to make it to Canton.
Chicago Bears Hall of Fame defensive end Richard Dent wore that number for one season with the Indianapolis Colts late in his career, but he wore No. 95 in his other 14 NFL seasons and will thus be under consideration as one of the best to ever don that number.
The only real challenger to Kennedy for the best to wear 96 would be former Eagles star defensive end Clyde Simmons, who starred for Philadelphia in the late 1980s to early 1990s before becoming a veteran journeyman and closing his career with stints in Arizona, Jacksonville, Cincinnati and Chicago.
Simmons earned two Pro Bowl and two first-team All-Pro honors and led the NFL with 19 sacks in 1992, finishing third in Defensive Player of the Year voting the season Kennedy won it. He totaled 966 tackles and 121.5 sacks in 15 seasons.
