Who Randy Hylands Actually Was in the NFL
Randy Hylands was a fullback who came out of BYU in the mid-1980s. He went undrafted in 1985, signed with the New Orleans Saints as a free agent, and spent parts of three seasons in the league before moving into the CFL where he actually found more sustained success. Most people who ask about him are trying to trace a specific path from college standout to NFL roster to eventual CFL stardom, usually because they're researching forgotten players from that era or building some kind of database of undrafted NFL folk. His NFL stats are sparse. He appeared in games for New Orleans and briefly San Diego, collecting a handful of carries and one reception over roughly two seasons. That's about all the paper trail exists for most players at his level. The real story is how he developed after the NFL let him go.
Uncovering Randy Hylands NFL Journey The Rise And Fall Of A Football Legend
When you actually dig into Hylands' career, you run into a common problem: the NFL's own records from that era are incomplete for reserve players. I spent an afternoon trying to pull his full game log from Pro Football Reference and the NFC South team pages from 1985 to 1987, and I kept hitting gaps. Carries per game, snap counts, roster status changes — half of it just isn't indexed properly. What I ended up doing was pulling the Saints' 1985 and 1986 media guides from archive.org, cross-referencing with the Salt Lake Tribune archives for BYU coverage, and then checking the CFL stats database for his later years. That combination gave me a much clearer picture than any single source. Here's the practical workflow I use when tracking down players like Hylands who fall through the cracks of mainstream databases: Start with the NFL draft records to confirm whether the player was drafted or went undrafted. For Hylands, the 1985 NFL Draft lists show no selection. Then check ESPN's historical free agency archives and the team's official year-by-year roster pages. From there, pull the player's college stats at the school's athletic department site — BYU's football records are well-maintained and easy to navigate. Finally, check the CFL database if the player transitioned north, since Hylands had a notable multi-year run with Calgary and BC.
The counter-intuitive part most people miss is that NFL rosters from the 1980s are actually harder to verify than modern ones. Before the internet, teams didn't publish detailed statistical breakdowns, and many newspaper archives from that period were never digitized. I learned this the hard way when I assumed I could find Hylands' complete receiving logs online. They don't exist in any single digital repository. You have to reconstruct them from box scores in microfiche newspapers or request them through the NFL's public records office, which takes weeks. Another thing beginners overlook: the distinction between a player being "on the roster" and actually making the regular-season squad. Hylands was signed by New Orleans, waived, re-signed, and spent time on practice squads and injured reserve. Those transactions matter for understanding his actual playing time, but most aggregate sources just list him as a Saint without that context. I found the transaction history by checking the NFL's official press releases from September through November 1985, which are buried in their media archive but searchable if you know where to look. If you're trying to compile a complete timeline of Hylands' career, here's what I'd recommend beyond the basic routes:
Get the Full Details
Use the NFL Game Center archive for play-by-play data from games he actually appeared in. It's slow and the interface hasn't been updated in years, but it shows snap-level detail. Pair that with the Sporting News annual football guides from 1985 through 1988 — those are available on archive.org and contain roster breaks that the NFL's own site omits. For his CFL years, the Canadian Football League's historical stats page is surprisingly accurate, and the Calgary Stampeders' media guide archives have team-specific notes about his role and production. One limitation worth noting upfront: even with all these sources combined, some gaps remain. Hylands wasn't a high-profile player, so coverage of his practice squad exits and intra-squad evaluations simply doesn't exist in any accessible format. If you need exact snap counts or situational usage data for a particular game, you're likely out of luck unless you have access to game film. I tried once to pull a specific Saints game tape from 1986 through a film room service and was told the league doesn't retain those archives. That's a bottleneck you can't work around with research alone. The takeaway is that Hylands' journey isn't dramatically different from dozens of other undrafted backs from that era. He made it onto an NFL roster, saw limited action, got moved around the transaction wire, and then found his footing in the CFL where his size and blocking ability translated better to a different scheme. That pattern repeats across hundreds of names, which is why most of them fade from public record so quickly.
