John Elway, Deion Sanders Make Up Small Group in History with MiLB and Super Bowl Appearances

Before we put a bow on the Super Bowl and the 2024 NFL season, let’s play a quick trivia game.

Do you know how many athletes appeared in both a Super Bowl and played on a minor league team?

Five, according to research from MiLB.com.

Per the site, the first was Tom Brown, who played on victorious Green Bay Packers teams in Super Bowl I and II, the first one on Jan. 15, 1967. Football was the second choice for Brown, a safety. He turned to football after playing for the Washington Senators in 1963 and subsequently being demoted to the Eastern League. The next year, he was out of baseball, per MiLB.com.

The other four names are a bit more familiar:

1. Deion Sanders was the rarest of athletes, playing both Major League Baseball and in the NFL. But before it was Prime Time in baseball, Sanders spent parts of four seasons in the minor leagues – and parts of three more later in his career. Sanders played 14 NFL seasons and won Super Bowl XXIX with the San Francisco 49ers in 1995 and SB XXX with the Dallas Cowboys the following year. He was enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2011. He appeared in the minors with affiliates for the Yankees, Braves, Reds and Toronto Blue Jays.

2. Before he became a Super Bowl-winning, Hall of Fame quarterback, John Elway was a star outfielder at Stanford. Selected in the second round of the 1981 MLB Draft by the Yankees, Elway headed to Class-A short season the following summer and hit .318 in 42 games in 1982. But he didn’t return to the minors. The Baltimore Colts selected Elway with the No. 1 overall pick in the 1983 draft, and when Elway said he wouldn’t sign with the team, he was traded to Denver. And a legendary NFL career began.

Elway took the Broncos to five Super Bowl games and he won the final two – Super Bowl XXXII and XXXIII in 1999, the final one representing his last NFL game before retirement.

3. John Lynch, who won Super Bowl XXXVII in 2002 with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. According to the timeline put together by MiLB.com, Lynch was a pitcher in the then-Florida Marlins organization and threw the first pitch in organization history in 1992 for the Class-A Erie Sailors. He made nine pro baseball starts before deciding to follow a different career path.

Lynch went 0-3 over seven starts for the Sailors, though he compiled a solid 2.15 ERA. He made two starts for Class-A Kane County the following season before committing himself full time to football.

There's a long history of athletes playing in both Minor League Baseball and the Super Bowl.

Here's a look at six big names to grace both stages: https://t.co/hBzcr1wfqs pic.twitter.com/2e5ZKwfpcl
— Minor League Baseball (@MiLB) February 9, 2025

4. Russell Wilson played two seasons as an infielder in the Colorado Rockies system, appearing in 93 Class-A games over the 2010 and 2011 campaigns. A career .229 hitter, he turned to football and made back-to-back starts at quarterback for the Seattle Seahawks in the Super Bowl, winning Super Bowl XLVIII in 2014.

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