96 Days to Green Bay Packers Football: Greatest Player #96- Dick Himes

The Green Bay Packers will kickoff their 2023 season 96 days from now against the Chicago Bears. In celebration of a new era of Packers football and in anticipation for the upcoming season, Wisconsin Sports Heroics will present the top 100 players in franchise history in the 100 days leading up to the start of the regular season. Our rankings are based on Pro Football References Approximate Value stat, which gives a numeric value to each season a player plays in.

Green Bay Packers Greatest Players: #96- Dick Himes

For the past 18 years, Packers fans have been talking about how difficult it must be to take over for a legend. Of course, they are referring to Aaron Rodgers taking over for Brett Favre and Jordan Love taking over for Rodgers at the quarterback position. Indeed, the quarterback position might very well be the most talked about and over-analyzed position in all of sports. The positions of those that protect them, though, the offensive linemen, may be the most overlooked.

Perhaps that is why no one ever talks about how difficult it must have been for Dick Himes to take over at right tackle from Hall of Famer Forrest Gregg. Stepping into the shoes of a legend are never easy. However, perhaps being at such an underappreciate position helped. That being said, because it is such an underappreciated position, no one talks about how great of a job he did.

Himes was drafted by the Packers in the third round (81st overall pick) in the 1968 NFL Draft. For the first two years of his career, he was strictly a backup, appearing in every game but starting none of them. In 1971, he took over as the starting right tackle.

Of Himes, Packers’ historian Cliff Cristi wrote:

“Like Koch, Earl Dotson, Mark Tauscher and Bryan Bulaga who followed him and basically have manned the right tackle position in Green Bay for 32 of the past 42 years, Himes was rock solid without ever making first-team All-Pro. Again, like those four mainstays who followed him, Himes had the versatility to be comparably efficient as a drive blocker and a pass protector.

“Think about it, counting Himes’ eight years as a starter, the right tackle position, where it is so important to have someone who can both drive a defensive end off the ball in the strong-side running game and also hold up on an island in pass protection, has been more than capably filled for 42 of the Packers’ previous 50 seasons. (And before that, they had Gregg for more than a decade.)

“Although all five were cut from a different cloth, they all had what scouts call “good feet.” In other words, they were good athletes. In Himes’ case, his background alone illustrates it.

“He started three years at Ohio State: as a defensive end as a sophomore, as a defensive tackle as a junior and as an offensive tackle as a senior. What’s more, he was All-Big Ten as a junior and senior at two different positions. It would be interesting to know how many linemen in a program like Ohio State have ever done something like that since the start of the two-platoon era of college football in the 1960s.”