Vikings Legend · Guard · No. 64
Randall McDaniel
Pro Football Hall of Fame, Class of 2009 · Vikings Ring of Honor, 2006
A guard is judged by what does not happen — the sack that never lands, the snap he never misses. For twelve seasons in Minnesota, almost nothing happened to Randall McDaniel.
Minnesota took him nineteenth overall in 1988 out of Arizona State. He started fifteen games as a rookie, and from the following season he began a run of 202 consecutive starts that did not end until he retired after the 2001 season — twelve straight Pro Bowls inside it, and no season after his first in which he was not an all-star.
- Consecutive starts
- 202
- Straight Pro Bowls
- 12
- Seasons in purple
- 12
- Hall of Fame
- 2009
Overview
Randall McDaniel at a Glance
Fourteen NFL seasons, twelve of them in Minnesota, and 220 starts in 222 games played.
- Full name
- Randall Cornell McDaniel
- Born
- December 19, 1964, in Phoenix, Arizona
- Position
- Guard · No. 64
- Listed size
- 6 ft 3 in, 276 lb
- High school
- Agua Fria, Avondale, Arizona
- College
- Arizona State
- Drafted
- 1988, round 1, 19th overall, by Minnesota
- Minnesota Vikings
- 1988–1999 · 190 games, 188 starts
- Tampa Bay Buccaneers
- 2000–2001 · 32 games, 32 starts
- Career totals
- 222 games, 220 starts over 14 seasons
A first-round pick who never came out
McDaniel arrived in Minnesota as an All-America and four-year starter from Arizona State, taken with the Vikings' first-round selection — nineteenth overall — in the 1988 draft. He won a starting job immediately, appeared in all sixteen games as a rookie and started fifteen of them, and was named to several all-rookie teams as well as a second-team All-NFC pick.
That was the last unremarkable season he had. Beginning in 1989 he was selected to the Pro Bowl after twelve consecutive seasons, a run that carried through his final Minnesota year in 1999 and continued into his first season with Tampa Bay. He finished his playing career with the Buccaneers after the 2001 season.
He is one of two Vikings Hall of Famers from the 1990s core profiled on this site alongside John Randle, and shared a locker room with Cris Carter for a decade.
Living, and still in a school building. McDaniel is alive; he was born in December 1964 and turned 61 in 2025. His post-football life has been spent almost entirely in elementary education in the Twin Cities.
Offensive linemen accumulate almost no counting statistics. Everything on this page is either an honour, a games-and-starts total, or a specific documented event — there is nothing here that has been estimated or filled in.
Durability
202 Consecutive Starts
The Hall of Fame's own summary of McDaniel's career puts the streak at its centre: it began in 1989 and, in the Hall's phrasing, “continued through the end of his career.”
What the streak actually covers
McDaniel played every game of every season from 1990 onward — sixteen starts a year, twelve years running, across two franchises and a knee brace. The only games he did not start in fourteen professional seasons came in 1988 and 1989, before the streak began.
The Hall of Fame also records that he started thirteen consecutive playoff games for the Vikings during that stretch, and that his 190 regular-season appearances in Minnesota are tied for seventh in franchise history, level with offensive tackle Grady Alderman.
There is a second streak wrapped inside the first. After the 1989 season he was voted to the Pro Bowl, and he was voted to it again after every season through 2000 — twelve in a row, the Hall of Fame notes, a record run of consecutive selections for the AFC–NFC game.
The Hall of Fame credits him with blocking for six different 1,000-yard rushers and five 3,000-yard passers over the fourteen seasons.
In 1994 he anchored a line that allowed one sack every 22.7 pass attempts — at the time the second-best ratio in Vikings history.
In 1998, the season Minnesota scored a then-NFL-record 556 points, the Hall of Fame's account has McDaniel allowing 1.5 sacks all year while the Vikings' backs averaged 5.4 yards a carry running to his side.
Season by season
Fourteen Seasons, Line by Line
Games played, games started and the honours attached to each year. A guard's record is a ledger, so here it is as one.
| Season | Team | Games | Starts | Honours |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1988 | Minnesota Vikings | 16 | 15 | — |
| 1989 | Minnesota Vikings | 14 | 13 | Pro Bowl |
| 1990 | Minnesota Vikings | 16 | 16 | Pro BowlAP All-Pro 1st |
| 1991 | Minnesota Vikings | 16 | 16 | Pro BowlAP All-Pro 2nd |
| 1992 | Minnesota Vikings | 16 | 16 | Pro BowlAP All-Pro 1st |
| 1993 | Minnesota Vikings | 16 | 16 | Pro BowlAP All-Pro 1st |
| 1994 | Minnesota Vikings | 16 | 16 | Pro BowlAP All-Pro 1st |
| 1995 | Minnesota Vikings | 16 | 16 | Pro BowlAP All-Pro 1st |
| 1996 | Minnesota Vikings | 16 | 16 | Pro BowlAP All-Pro 1st |
| 1997 | Minnesota Vikings | 16 | 16 | Pro BowlAP All-Pro 2nd |
| 1998 | Minnesota Vikings | 16 | 16 | Pro BowlAP All-Pro 1st |
| 1999 | Minnesota Vikings | 16 | 16 | Pro Bowl |
| 2000 | Tampa Bay Buccaneers | 16 | 16 | Pro Bowl |
| 2001 | Tampa Bay Buccaneers | 16 | 16 | — |
| 14 seasons | Minnesota, Tampa Bay | 222 | 220 | 12 Pro Bowls |
Pro Bowl selected to the Pro Bowl AP All-Pro 1st Associated Press first team AP All-Pro 2nd Associated Press second team
Honours
Every Selection, Dated
Selections are where an offensive lineman's case is actually argued, so each one below carries the year it belongs to.
-
1989–2000
Twelve consecutive Pro Bowls
Selected after every season from 1989 through 2000 — eleven of them as a Viking, the last as a Buccaneer. The Hall of Fame describes it as a record run of consecutive Pro Bowl selections.
-
1990–1998
All-Pro, nine straight seasons
The Pro Football Hall of Fame credits McDaniel with nine straight first-team All-Pro selections from 1990 through 1998. By the Associated Press ballot specifically, he was first team in 1990, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996 and 1998, and second team in 1991 and 1997.
-
1990s
NFL All-Decade Team of the 1990s
Named to the league's All-Decade team for the decade in which he started every single game.
-
2000
Vikings 40th Anniversary Team
Chosen at offensive guard on the franchise team named for the club's fortieth season.
-
2006
Minnesota Vikings Ring of Honor
Inducted on December 17, 2006, as the Ring of Honor's representative at guard.
-
2009
Pro Football Hall of Fame
Enshrined in Canton on August 8, 2009, with the Class of 2009: Bob Hayes, Randall McDaniel, Bruce Smith, Derrick Thomas, Ralph Wilson Jr. and Rod Woodson.
-
2019
NFL 100 All-Time Team
Named one of seven guards on the team assembled for the league's hundredth season, alongside Bruce Matthews, Larry Allen, John Hannah, Jim Parker, Gene Upshaw and Dan Fortmann.
On No. 64: honoured, but not retired
McDaniel's No. 64 hangs in the Ring of Honor, not among the club's retired numbers. The Vikings have retired six numbers — 10 (Fran Tarkenton), 53 (Mick Tingelhoff), 70 (Jim Marshall), 77 (Korey Stringer), 80 (Cris Carter) and 88 (Alan Page). No. 64 is not one of them and remains available to the roster.
Technique
The Stance That Started as an Accident
McDaniel's stance was the most-discussed thing about him on the field, and by his own account it was never designed.
A brace, and then a habit
In a 2009 interview with ESPN's Kevin Seifert, published the day before his enshrinement, McDaniel explained where the stance came from. He hurt his right knee in 1990 when teammate Todd Kalis rolled up on his leg, and came back wearing a brace. “The only way I could get down in a stance,” he said, “was to turn my other leg out.”
The result — left leg thrown out, ankle turned almost flat to the turf — looked wrong. He kept it anyway, because of something a defensive lineman said to him across the line of scrimmage: that he had no clue what McDaniel was doing, and could not tell whether he was about to pull, pass-set or come straight at him.
That was the whole advantage. A stance that gave away nothing, arrived by accident. “That's where it all came from,” McDaniel told Seifert. “One little brace, one little accident.”
What we have not claimed. McDaniel's stance is sometimes described in later write-ups as a sprinter's or track stance. We have not found that description in a primary source, so this page describes only what he himself said about it.
The same caution applies to his athleticism: the sprint times and workout numbers that circulate for him could not be verified against the Hall of Fame or the Vikings, and so are not repeated here.
“I'm just a big kid out there playing this kid's game — we all are grown men playing a kid's game.”
Context
The 1990s Vikings, From the Inside Out
McDaniel's Minnesota years overlapped almost exactly with the two other Hall of Famers this site profiles from that era.
Three Hall of Famers, one locker room
McDaniel played in Minnesota from 1988 to 1999. John Randle arrived as an undrafted free agent in 1990 and stayed through 2000; Cris Carter joined in 1990 and played through 2001. For a decade the three of them were on the same roster, and all three are now in Canton.
The Vikings' own honours lists show how tightly those careers ran together. In 1994, 1995, 1996 and 1997, McDaniel and Randle were named All-Pro by multiple selectors in the same seasons; in 1998 McDaniel, Randle, Carter, Randall Cunningham, Randy Moss and Gary Anderson were all first-team selections on the same team.
That 1998 season is the one Minnesota still argues about. The offence scored a then-league-record 556 points behind a line McDaniel anchored, and lost the NFC Championship Game at home.
1996, the odd entry. Late that season, against the Arizona Cardinals, the Vikings gave McDaniel two goal-line carries — the only rushing attempts of his career, worth one yard.
A couple of months later he caught a touchdown pass in the Pro Bowl, which the Hall of Fame records as the first by a guard in AFC–NFC Pro Bowl history.
2000, in Tampa. His first Buccaneers team rushed for 2,066 yards, including a franchise single-game record 250 against Dallas. He was voted to his twelfth and final Pro Bowl for it.
After football
Mr. McDaniel
He did not wait long. The retirement press conference and the first day of substitute teaching were the same afternoon.
From Canton to the corridor
In February 2002 McDaniel held his retirement press conference at Lakeville Elementary School in Minnesota, and later that same afternoon stepped in as a substitute teacher. He had already been volunteering in Twin Cities classrooms during his playing career, helping with reading while he was still a first-team All-Pro.
In a November 2019 feature, the Vikings described him as working full time as a basic skills instructor and tutor at a Twin Cities elementary school — standing at the entrance each morning to greet every student arriving. He has said he reads a child walking through the door the way he used to read a defensive front: “It's like breaking down a football play. If they walk in and there's something not right with the read that I'm getting, then I'm automatically” on alert.
He and his wife Marianne also run Team McDaniel, a volunteer programme, and in 2019 he hosted his first charity golf tournament, raising $73,000 for Open Arms Home for Children in Komga, South Africa.
A deliberate change of course. McDaniel has said that a moment in a college class turned him away from a physical education degree and toward the classroom itself: “I wanted to be in the classroom.”
The specifics above — the school, the role, the year — come from the Vikings' own reporting. Where his current job title or school could not be confirmed for 2026, this page does not state one.
Legacy
What a Guard Leaves Behind
The case, stated plainly
There is no sack total to point at, no reception count, no yardage. What McDaniel leaves is a shape: twelve straight Pro Bowls, nine straight All-Pro years by the Hall of Fame's count, 202 consecutive starts, and a decade in which the Minnesota offensive line did not have to think about left guard.
When the NFL chose seven guards for its hundredth-anniversary All-Time Team in 2019, he was one of them — and one of only three Vikings Hall of Famers named to that team, with Alan Page and John Randle.
The Vikings put him in their Ring of Honor in December 2006, two and a half years before Canton did. Both were arrived at the same way: by a player turning up, starting, and not stopping.
Continue through the franchise story in Vikings history, decade by decade, or compare the numbers alongside the rest of the record book in Vikings stats and franchise records.
Where these records come from
Biographical details, games and starts, and season-by-season Pro Bowl and Associated Press All-Pro selections are taken from Randall McDaniel's Pro Football Reference player record. Career narrative, the 202-start streak, the twelve consecutive Pro Bowls, the nine consecutive All-Pro seasons, the 1994, 1996, 1998 and 2000 season details and the quotation above come from his Pro Football Hall of Fame profile and the Hall's 2009 enshrinement coverage. Ring of Honor and retired-number information, the NFL 100 All-Time Team selection and the account of his teaching career come from the Minnesota Vikings' official site and its November 25, 2019 feature on his work in education. The explanation of his stance comes from Kevin Seifert's August 7, 2009 ESPN interview with McDaniel. Statements of record are current as of September 13, 2026.
- Minnesota Vikings IO is an independent, unofficial fan site. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to the Minnesota Vikings, the National Football League or the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
Two Hundred and Two
The number that carries Randall McDaniel's case is not a statistic he produced. It is a count of the times he lined up, from 1989 until the day he stopped — and it is the reason a guard is in Canton.
More Vikings historyMinnesota Vikings IO is an independent, unofficial fan site. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to the Minnesota Vikings, the National Football League or the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Team names and marks belong to their respective owners.