Football has evolved into a pass-dependent game, and the NFL is flooded with former standout SEC receivers like Julio Jones, A.J. Green, Randall Cobb, Alshon Jeffery and Odell Beckham, just to name a few.

So it’s hard to imagine that of all the talented receivers to pass through the SEC on their path to professional football, only two are among the 31 receivers immortalized in the Pro Football Hall of Fame: former Alabama star Don Hutson and former Arkansas flanker Lance Alworth (both also represent their SEC programs in the College Football Hall of Fame).

Hutson and Alworth were two of the great players of their day, even though they both played when passing was more of a last resort than the focal point of an offense.

Hutson, a consensus All-American at Alabama in 1934, set more than a dozen NFL records during his career with the Green Bay Packers from 1935-45. His 14 catches in a game were a record for the time period (now not a week goes by that at least one receiver doesn’t amass double figure catches in a single game), as were his 74 receptions and 1,211 yards in a single season (last year’s NFL leader, Antonio Brown, had 129 catches and 1,698 yards).

Hutson even set league records by amassing 488 catches for 7,991 yards during his 11-year career, an average of 44 catches and 726 yards per season. Those numbers would appear pedestrian by today’s standards, but they were virtually unheard of when Hutson posted them in the early days of the NFL.

He was a two-time league MVP and an eight-time All-Pro during his NFL career, and his number was eventually retired by the Packers.

And when considering he also played safety on defense in addition to sometimes maintaining place-kicking duties, his achievements seem even more impressive. Hutson was simply a complete football player who predated Bear Bryant in Tuscaloosa and remains one of the great Tide players to advance to the NFL in history even after all these years.

Alworth’s career, on the other hand, began nearly 20 years after Hutson’s came to an end. The former Arkansas track star and football All-American was drafted in both the NFL and AFL Drafts in 1962, opting to play with the AFL’s San Diego Chargers.

The lanky speedster was a bit ahead of his time, but the Chargers put him to good use in the newly formed AFL. His five career games with at least 200 yards receiving remain an NFL record that only one player in the last 50 years has been able to even tie (Detroit’s Calvin Johnson).

He led the AFL in catches and yards in three of his eight seasons, amassed at least 1,000 yards in seven of those seasons and caught a pass in a record 96 straight games.

Opposing defenders simply couldn’t contain Alworth’s speed and long limbs, and in the days where defensive schemes were much simpler the Chargers had no hesitation in looking Alworth’s way play after play.

By the peak of his career in 1969, one year before the NFL and AFL merged (Alworth spent the 1971-72 seasons with the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys), Sports Illustrated put Alworth on the cover of its magazine and called him “Pro football’s top receiver,” even though the AFL was seen as an inferior league to the NFL at the time.

He was an AFL champion in 1963 and an NFL champion in 1971, and like Hutson his legacy will live on forever in the Pro and College Football Halls of Fame.

Receivers get more run nowadays, but there’s yet to be an SEC wideout to achieve more in the pros than Hutson or Alworth more than 40 years ago.