The 2017 NFL season is in full swing. It's the time of year when you get to spend your Sunday afternoons stuck to the La-Z-Boy with your remote glued in one hand and a protein shake in the other. It might seem like a wasted day, but it's not. You need the recovery time after yet another heavy week of training. Hell, you DESERVE it.

You don't have to have the trained football eye of John Madden to recognize there are some freakish athletes that play the sport of football at the highest level. Just look at Eli Manning and Sabastian Janikowski... But seriously, NFL players are some of the biggest, fastest, and strongest men in the world. It kind of makes you wonder just what kind of numbers some of these guys could put up if they powerlifted competitively. Luckily for you we dug into all the info we could find on some of the NFL's top performers in an effort to answer that question. We used a combination of sports media sources, Instagram lifting posts, 1RM calculating, and scientific guestimating to determine the potential numbers that each gridiron star could put up on the platform if they were to compete. Keep in mind that the weights we ended up with are what these players would have the potential to hit during their off-season training. Most of these guys don't spend a lot of time specifically training for powerlifting. There is no doubt that their ceiling could be significantly higher if it was their primary focus.



Also, if these guys were powerlifters, we know for sure they would be much, much poorer than they are now. Instead of signing multi-million dollar contracts, they could be scraping and pleading to get a "sponsorship" that might include a 15% discount on supplements that are already marked up 40%. With deals that sweet it's kind of hard to believe that these guys chose football over powerlifting.

JJ Watt