Best college football players of all time from every state

Massachusetts – Angelo Bertelli

Massachusetts, though it definitely didn’t seem so in my mind before some research, is a well-known producer of great college football talent.

The only catch to that—is that most of the great football players from Massachusetts played when the game was still very, very young. Massachusetts has since fallen from football grace, but the history still wins out in this list. With most of the talent in the early days of football coming out of the northeast to schools like Harvard and Yale, but this specific player went a bit further away.

Angelo Bertelli was one of the greatest Notre Dame players of all time. A quarterback/single-wing tailback from West Springfield, Bertelli led the Fighting Irish to 24 wins in his time at the University, with just three losses in his three years at school.

Bertelli was the runner-up for the Heisman trophy in 1941, throwing for 1,027 yards. There aren’t many other statistics left from that year for Bertelli, and numbers don’t necessarily tell the whole story anyway.

He was the Heisman winner in 1943 and was a consensus All-American in that same year, despite only playing in six games, in which he threw for 512 passing yards and 10 touchdowns. He was the first overall pick in the NFL Draft in 1944 and played in Los Angeles and Chicago.