Throwbacks: Grambling 80 list honored best football players over program's first eight decades

The News-Star selected the top 80 players from Grambling as the storied program celebrated eight decades of football in 2006.

GRAMBLING — Grambling resident Ray Higgins' grandfather, Milton "Twenty" Douglas, was on the local college's first football team, organized 80 years ago. No, Eddie Robinson wasn't Grambling's first head football coach — a common mistake, Higgins notes, chuckling. It might seem that way since Robinson coached nearly 60 of those years.

Higgins is celebrating that long history of football at Grambling — both by highlighting its storied accomplishments and adjusting a few misconceptions — on a fan-operated Web site called http://www.gramblingstateuniversity.com/. There, he's informally polling fans across the nation to assemble a list of the program's Top 80 all-time players. "The great thing has been talking with people from different eras about Grambling's history," said Higgins, a booster who graduated from Grambling Lab and then GSU.

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