South Dakota has had plenty of highly athletic football players throughout its time. Some of them have even went on to have a successful career at the college and professional level. One of these men is John Dutton, who to this day is the highest drafted NFL player in South Dakota history.
Dutton was born in Rapid City and was a graduate of Rapid City high school in 1969. The next school year, Stevens high school opened, and Rapid City high school became known as Central high school. Most of his high school career was spent at Cathedral high school, the catholic school in Rapid City at the time, but when that closed in 1968, he moved over to Rapid City high school to be a Cobbler.
While Dutton is known primarily today for his success in football, his basketball athleticism in high school drew more college scholarship offers than football. During his senior year in 1969, he helped lead the Cobblers to a state basketball championship with a 57-50 win over Brookings in the state title game. He was both a two-time all-state football and basketball player in high school.
Eventually, Dutton decided to pursue a career in football and chose Nebraska to be his college home. He was named both an All-American defensive lineman and received All-Big Eight honors as a senior in 1973. Dutton was a backup his sophomore season when Nebraska won the national championship in the ‘Game of the Century’ against Oklahoma.
In the 1974 National Football League draft, the Baltimore Colts selected Dutton with the fifth overall pick. To this day, no South Dakotan in history has been chosen higher in the NFL draft.
Dutton spent his first five seasons in the NFL with the team that drafted him. He was named to the NFL All-Rookie Team and three Pro Bowl’s throughout his time with Baltimore. While sacks didn’t become an official NFL statistic until 1982, Pro Football Reference has since gone back and calculated every individual player sack since 1960.
Unofficially, Dutton had 46.5 sacks in his first five NFL seasons. In 1979, he was traded to the Dallas Cowboys where he remained for the next nine-seasons, the rest of his career. With Dallas he recorded another 26.5 unofficial sacks and reached the conference championship game in 1980, ’81, and ’82 with the Cowboys. Dutton retired after the 1987 season where he only played in four games. Today, he is both a member of the University of Nebraska Athletics Hall of Fame (1981) and the South Dakota Sports Hall of Fame (1993).
To some, he’s considered the best defensive lineman in Dallas Cowboys history to have not won a Super Bowl.
