Vikings Legend · Defensive End · No. 70 · Ring of Honor, 1999
Jim Marshall
Twenty seasons. Two hundred and eighty-two straight games. Not one missed.
James Lawrence Marshall played right defensive end for the Minnesota Vikings from 1961 to 1979 and never missed a game in his entire twenty-season NFL career. He was the captain of the Purple People Eaters, the on-field leader of four Super Bowl teams, and the holder of an availability record that stood for a quarter of a century.
He was drafted by the Cleveland Browns in the fourth round of the 1960 NFL Draft, played one season in Cleveland, and arrived in Minnesota by trade in September 1961. He started the Vikings' first regular-season game and was still starting eighteen years later, two weeks before his forty-second birthday.
Every season, every game · 1960–1979Bar height = games played that season
- 1960 · 12G
- 1961 · 14G
- 1962 · 14G
- 1963 · 14G
- 1964 · 14G
- 1965 · 14G
- 1966 · 14G
- 1967 · 14G
- 1968 · 14G
- 1969 · 14G
- 1970 · 14G
- 1971 · 14G
- 1972 · 14G
- 1973 · 14G
- 1974 · 14G
- 1975 · 14G
- 1976 · 14G
- 1977 · 14G
- 1978 · 16G
- 1979 · 16G
Twenty bars, no gaps. Marshall played all twelve games of his rookie season in Cleveland and every one of the 270 regular-season games the Vikings played from 1961 through 1979 — 282 consecutive regular-season appearances in total. Season-by-season games-played figures are from Pro Football Reference.
Overview
Jim Marshall at a Glance
A fourth-round pick who spent one year in Cleveland, nineteen in Minnesota, and two decades never sitting down.
Player Snapshot
- Full name
- James Lawrence Marshall
- Position
- Defensive end (right side)
- Number
- 70 with Minnesota
- Height / weight
- 6′4″ · 248 lb
- Born
- Dec 30, 1937 · Boyle County, Kentucky
- Died
- Jun 3, 2025 · Minneapolis, Minnesota, aged 87
- High school
- East High School, Columbus, Ohio
- College
- Ohio State (1956–1958)
- Before Minnesota
- Saskatchewan Roughriders, CFL, 1959; Cleveland Browns, NFL, 1960
- NFL Draft
- 1960 · Round 4, Pick 44, Cleveland Browns
- Vikings years
- 1961–1979
- Ring of Honor
- 1999
- Jersey No. 70
- Retired by the Vikings, Nov 28, 1999
- Hall of Fame
- Not inducted · finalist in 2004
Why He Mattered
Marshall was the constant. He played right defensive end opposite Carl Eller, beside Alan Page and Gary Larsen, in the front four that gave the Minnesota Vikings their identity and carried the franchise to four Super Bowls. Page and Eller are in Canton. Marshall is not.
What set him apart from every other player of his era was not a single season but the absence of any missing ones. He started the first game the Vikings ever played in 1961 and he started their last game of 1979, and between those two dates he did not miss one snap of a Sunday. Bud Grant, who coached him for thirteen of those years and was not given to overstatement, put it plainly in 1979: Durability is the most important ability you have.
He was also the leader of the room. Marshall was named a Vikings team captain fourteen times, which is still a club record, and in 2024 the team built the Jim Marshall Vikings Captains Legacy wall at its practice facility to mark it.
Read Next
The Streak
A Career You Can Measure in Games Not Missed
Defensive end is the position that breaks people. Marshall played it for twenty years without ever handing his job to a backup.
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282
Most consecutive regular-season games played in NFL history when he retired in 1979. The mark was eventually broken by punter Jeff Feagles in 2005. It remains the record for a defensive player.
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270
Most consecutive regular-season starts in NFL history — a record that stood for thirty years. Brett Favre passed it in 2009, while playing for Minnesota. It is still the record for a defensive player, and still the record for consecutive starts with one team.
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29
Opponents' fumbles recovered — an NFL career record, since tied by Jason Taylor. Pro Football Reference credits him with 30 fumble recoveries in all, the most by a defensive end.
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14×
Named a Minnesota Vikings team captain, which remains a franchise record. Honoured in 2024 with the Jim Marshall Vikings Captains Legacy wall at the TCO Performance Center.
“I told him I admired his career and was really happy that he was the one that is breaking that record.”
Marshall could not attend the game in September 2009 at which Favre surpassed him — it fell on his wedding anniversary — so he went to the Vikings' practice facility a few days later and congratulated Favre in person. It is a small detail, and it is the one his team-mates tended to reach for when asked what he was like.
The Front Four
Right End on the Purple People Eaters
Marshall held the right edge for the entire run of the most famous defensive line in Vikings history, and he was its captain.
Jim Marshall
The captain and the constant. Nineteen seasons in Minnesota without missing a game, and the only member of the four to play in all four Vikings Super Bowls and every playoff game in between.
Carl Eller
Marshall's opposite number for fifteen seasons and a Hall of Famer, Class of 2004. Read the Carl Eller profile.
Alan Page
The most decorated of the four and the NFL's Most Valuable Player in 1971. Read the Alan Page profile.
Gary Larsen
The fourth original member, holding the interior alongside Page. Doug Sutherland took over the position from 1974.
The nickname belonged to the group, but the seniority belonged to Marshall. He was already a Viking when Eller arrived in 1964 and when Page arrived in 1967, and he was still there after both had gone. Nineteen of the twenty seasons he played were in Minnesota, and for eleven of them the same four men lined up in front of the same linebackers.
That continuity is the quiet reason the line worked. Minnesota could rush four and drop seven because the four could get there on their own, and they could get there on their own partly because they had played next to each other for a decade and knew exactly where the other three would be. The Vikings won ten division titles between 1968 and 1978, the 1969 NFL Championship, and NFC titles in 1973, 1974 and 1976.
For the full story of the unit, see the site's Purple People Eaters history.
25 October 1964
The Wrong-Way Run, Accurately
It is the play everybody knows and almost nobody remembers correctly. It was not a touchdown for anyone, it cost two points rather than six, and Minnesota won the game anyway.
At Kezar Stadium against the San Francisco 49ers, Marshall recovered a 49ers fumble in the open field.
He ran 66 yards in the wrong direction, into Minnesota's own end zone, with 49ers lineman Bruce Bosley following him.
Believing he had scored, he threw the ball away in celebration. It landed out of bounds.
The result was a safety — two points for San Francisco. It was not a touchdown, and no touchdown was awarded to either team on the play.
Marshall did not realise what had happened until Bosley thanked him on the way back to the sideline and Fran Tarkenton, standing on the near touchline, explained it to him. By his own account, the only thing head coach Norm Van Brocklin said to him afterwards was: Well Jim, you've done the most interesting thing in this game today.
He received a letter shortly afterwards from Roy Riegels, who had run the wrong way in the 1929 Rose Bowl, which read simply, Welcome to the club.
In 2019 the play was ranked No. 54 on the NFL's list of its 100 Greatest Plays.
It is worth stating the arithmetic plainly, because the play is so often retold wrongly. A safety is worth two points. The Vikings won by five. The wrong-way run did not decide the game, and the same player who made it also created the touchdown that helped win it.
Super Bowls
Four Trips, Four Losses
Marshall started all four Super Bowls the Minnesota Vikings have played. The Vikings lost every one of them, and the franchise is still waiting for its first title.
| Game | Season | Opponent | Result |
|---|---|---|---|
| Super Bowl IV | 1969 | Kansas City Chiefs | Lost 23–7 |
| Super Bowl VIII | 1973 | Miami Dolphins | Lost 24–7 |
| Super Bowl IX | 1974 | Pittsburgh Steelers | Lost 16–6 |
| Super Bowl XI | 1976 | Oakland Raiders | Lost 32–14 |
There is no way to write around this and it would be dishonest to try. Marshall was a starter on four teams that reached the final game of the season and lost four times, to four different opponents. He is one of only eleven players who appeared in all four of them.
The one championship he did win came before the merger: the Vikings beat the Cleveland Browns in the 1969 NFL Championship Game, which sent them to Super Bowl IV. For the complete record of all four games, see the site's Vikings Super Bowl history.
Career Record
Twenty Seasons, Line by Line
Games, starts, fumble recoveries and unofficial sacks for every season Jim Marshall played, as recorded by Pro Football Reference.
| Season | Team | G | GS | Fum rec | Sacks |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1960 | CLE | 12 | 4 | 1 | 2.5 |
| 1961 | MIN | 14 | 12 | 4 | 6.0 |
| 1962 | MIN | 14 | 14 | 2 | 9.0 |
| 1963 | MIN | 14 | 14 | 4 | 10.5 |
| 1964 | MIN | 14 | 14 | 2 | 11.5 |
| 1965 | MIN | 14 | 14 | 2 | 7.5 |
| 1966 | MIN | 14 | 14 | 0 | 7.0 |
| 1967 | MIN | 14 | 14 | 2 | 8.0 |
| 1968 | MIN | 14 | 14 | 1 | 10.0 |
| 1969 | MIN | 14 | 14 | 2 | 14.0 |
| 1970 | MIN | 14 | 14 | 2 | 6.5 |
| 1971 | MIN | 14 | 14 | 1 | 8.5 |
| 1972 | MIN | 14 | 14 | 1 | 0.0 |
| 1973 | MIN | 14 | 14 | 1 | 7.0 |
| 1974 | MIN | 14 | 14 | 0 | 3.0 |
| 1975 | MIN | 14 | 14 | 2 | 7.0 |
| 1976 | MIN | 14 | 14 | 0 | 4.0 |
| 1977 | MIN | 14 | 14 | 0 | 2.0 |
| 1978 | MIN | 16 | 16 | 2 | 4.0 |
| 1979 | MIN | 16 | 16 | 1 | 1.5 |
| 20 seasons | CLE / MIN | 282 | 272 | 30 | 129.5 |
About the sack totals. The sack was not an official NFL statistic until the 1982 season, which is three years after Jim Marshall retired. Every sack figure on this page is therefore unofficial: it was compiled after the fact from game accounts, team records and film research rather than from the league's own play-by-play, and the NFL has never certified it. Pro Football Reference's research credits Marshall with 129.5 career sacks, 127.0 of them with Minnesota. The Pro Football Hall of Fame and Wikipedia both cite 130.5. The Vikings list him second in franchise history with 127. These small differences are exactly what an unofficial statistic produces, and none of them should be read as a league record.
About the starts columns. Pro Football Reference's season-by-season games started data for the early 1960s does not line up exactly with the 270-consecutive-starts figure cited by the NFL, the Vikings and Marshall's Wikipedia biography, which put his career starts total at 277. Games-started records from that era are incomplete. The table above reproduces Pro Football Reference as published rather than adjusting it to match; the streak figures elsewhere on this page are the ones the league and the club use.
The Hall of Fame
He Is Not in the Pro Football Hall of Fame
This is the part of the story that has not finished. Jim Marshall has never been elected to Canton, and he died without being elected.
Marshall's line-mates Alan Page and Carl Eller are both enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Marshall is not, and no amount of affection for him changes that. He has no bust, no gold jacket and no induction year, and any page that implies otherwise is wrong.
His candidacy has been live for a long time. He reached the final ballot for the first and so far only time in 2004 and was not elected. In 2008 the NFL Network's NFL Top 10 named him the second-best player not in the Hall of Fame, behind only Jerry Kramer — who was himself inducted ten years later. He was listed as a semifinalist among the senior nominees in 2023 and 2024 without advancing to the final twelve. As of the Hall's October 2025 announcement he remained one of thirty-four senior candidates still in consideration for the Class of 2026.
In 2004, the same year as his one appearance as a finalist, Marshall was named to the Professional Football Researchers Association's Hall of Very Good in its second class — an honour that exists precisely for players in his position.
“No player in the history of the game ever played harder, longer than Jim Marshall.”
Honours
What Minnesota Gave Him Instead
On one evening in November 1999 the Vikings did both things at once: they put him in the Ring of Honor and retired his number.
Team and League Recognition
- Minnesota Vikings Ring of Honor, inducted 28 November 1999.
- No. 70 retired by the Minnesota Vikings, 28 November 1999 — one of six numbers the club has retired.
- NFL champion, 1969, with the Vikings.
- Two-time Pro Bowl selection, for the 1968 and 1969 seasons.
- Three-time second-team All-Pro: 1964, 1968 and 1969.
- Named to the 50 Greatest Vikings, the 25th Anniversary Team and the 40th Anniversary Team.
- At Ohio State: 1957 national champion and a third-team All-American in 1958.
His two Pro Bowls are a strikingly thin haul for a twenty-year starter, and that thinness is the crux of the Hall of Fame argument both for and against him.
Away From the Field
Marshall left Ohio State early and spent the 1959 season with the Saskatchewan Roughriders of the Canadian Football League before the Browns drafted him in 1960. He lived the rest of his life in Minnesota, latterly in St. Louis Park.
He had an appetite for risk that had nothing to do with football. He said he had jumped out of aeroplanes more than two thousand times, and he broke an arm and a leg in a hang-gliding crash in August 1980, months after retiring. In early 1971 he was one of sixteen men — including team-mate Paul Dickson and the Minneapolis sportswriter Jim Klobuchar — caught by a wind storm on a snowmobile expedition through the Beartooth Mountains. The machines froze. Marshall and Dickson burned the cash in their wallets to keep warm and survived the night in sub-zero temperatures.
After football he worked in financial services, real estate and insurance, and gave his time to foundations serving homeless and unemployed young people.
“I just hope I've given you as many thrills as you fans have given me. Thank you.”
Sourcing
Where These Records Came From
Career records, honours and biographical details on this page are drawn from Pro Football Reference for the season-by-season statistics, the Minnesota Vikings official legends listing and the club's tribute following his death, the Pro Football Hall of Fame for his candidacy record, NFL.com and Wikipedia. All sack totals predate the NFL's adoption of the sack as an official statistic in 1982 and are therefore unofficial, as explained in the career record section above; where sources differ, the differences are noted rather than smoothed over. Jim Marshall has not been inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. This is an independent fan site and is not affiliated with the Minnesota Vikings or the NFL.
Twenty Seasons, Nothing Missed
Jim Marshall started every game the Minnesota Vikings played for nineteen years. Whatever else the record books eventually decide about him, that part is settled.
More Vikings history