List of gridiron football players who died during their careers
Wikimedia list article
This is a list of players of gridiron football (American football and Canadian football) players who died while still on a team roster. Included are players in professional and college football who have died of any cause. For professional football players, the most common cause of death is vehicle crashes. For college players, the most common cause of death is in-game and practice injuries. Each player is listed with the team to which he was assigned at the time of his death, rather than the team with which he spent most of his career. Players who were free agents at the time of their death are not listed.
National Football League
1920–1965
1966–1995
1996–2021
2022–present
Canadian Football League
Minor league football and indoor football
College
Team vehicle and plane crashes
Purdue: 14 members of football team were killed in a railroad collision (1903).
Cal Poly: 16 players and 6 others died in an airplane crash (1960).
Northeastern Oklahoma A&M: 5 football players were killed in a head-on highway crash (1966).
Wichita State: most of the starting players and coaches, 31 in total, died in an airplane crash (1970).
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This entry incorporates text from “List of gridiron football players who died during their careers” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.