A fitting farewell to my 16-year career as an Olympic journalist.
10. Quarterbacks
Six Quarterbacks Who Changed the Game
This article appeared in the Aug. 17, 1998 issue of Sports Illustrated.
Good quarterbacks leave indelible stamps on the game, but a few of them go a step further. They change the game, through a style that gives life to a new offensive system, by force of personality or simply by coming along at the right time.
Here are the six NFL quarterbacks I believe effected the most profound changes. Sid Luckman was the first to run the modern T formation with a man in motion, which bore a striking resemblance to today’s basic set. Otto Graham, innovative and a deadly accurate passer, will nevertheless be remembered as the first man for whom his coach called all the plays. John Unitas was a tough, snarling veteran of the semipro ranks who clawed his way to the top; once he got there he battled to do things his way, no matter how his coach felt about it. Joe Namath became the standard-bearer for a league. He gave the AFL respectability, changed the salary structure of pro football and captivated fans with his brashness and flair. Joe Montana was the master of a system that swept the game, with its reliance on quick reads and short, precision passing. Finally, there was Doug Williams, who with one brilliant performance opened the way for today’s generation of black quarterbacks — make that quarterbacks who happen to be black — to multiply and flourish.
Many great quarterbacks — Sammy Baugh, Bobby Layne, Norm Van Brocklin and Dan Marino, for instance — were not included, not because of any lack of ability but because they didn’t have the impact the select half-dozen did.
When Sid Luckman died in July, at 81, the last originator of the oldest offensive formation still in use was gone. The T with a man in motion was the brain work of a coaching triumvirate of George Halas, Clark Shaughnessy and Ralph Jones, and Luckman, a 22-year-old Chicago Bears rookie out of Columbia, was the man chosen to implement it on the field. That was in 1939, and the basic set remains.
“I’d been a single-wing tailback,” Luckman said when I visited him at his Fort Lauderdale suburban apartment in May. “You’re set deep, the ball comes to you, and you either pass, run or spin. When I came to the Bears, we worked for hours on my spinning, on hiding the ball, only this time it was as a T quarterback. They brought in the old Bears quarterback, Carl Brumbaugh, to work with me. We spent endless time just going over my footwork, faking, spinning, setting up as fast as I could, running to my left and throwing right, days and days of it.”
Luckman seemed frail as we talked. All the charm that I remembered from the dozen or so times I had interviewed him through the years was there, but he’d occasionally stop to gather himself, to get things just right. Seated with him at a table heaped with charts and memorabilia and the scrapbooks of a lifetime in the game, I felt as if I were listening to Orville Wright describing the origins of the flying machine.
“Ralph Jones had coached the T with the Bears in the early 1930s,” Luckman said, “but it was the old T, with everyone bunched in there. Shaughnessy was coaching at the University of Chicago, and they were about to drop football, so he spent a lot of time with us. I’d be up in Shaughnessy’s room every night in training camp, going over every aspect of the thing. The whole idea was to spread the field and give the defense more area to cover.
“We had an 11 o’clock curfew, and Halas would drop by around 1 a.m. and say, ‘That’s enough, Sid. Go to bed.’”
The system was still experimental in 1939, and Luckman was a backup tailback in the Bears’ basic offense, the single wing. But on Oct. 22, with Chicago trailing the New York Giants 16-0 at the Polo Grounds, Halas told Luckman, “Get in at quarterback and run the T.”
“Bob MacLeod, our right halfback, went in motion and ran straight down the field on a stop-and-go,” Luckman said. “I was so nervous I threw a duck, end over end. The defensive back had the interception, but MacLeod took the ball away from him and went all the way. Then I threw a little swing pass to Bob Swisher, and he shook a couple of tackles and went 60 yards for another score. We lost the game 16-13, and we used the T off and on for the rest of the season, but no one made a big thing about it.”
The T explosion came one year later. While the Bears were using the formation to go 8-3 on the way to the NFL Championship Game, in which they would annihilate the Washington Redskins 73-0, Shaughnessy, who had moved on to coach Stanford, was dazzling the college world with the T. Stanford went 9-0, then beat Nebraska 21-13 in the Rose Bowl. The rush was on. “I went back to Columbia to help Lou Little put in the T,” Luckman said. “I went to Holy Cross, to Army when Red Blaik called me, to Notre Dame to work with Johnny Lujack and George Ratterman.”
The Bears won four NFL titles in the 1940s, and other teams gradually switched to the new formation. Luckman, who in 10 games in 1943 threw 28 touchdown passes en route to winning league MVP honors, was the first T master, a gifted passer, long and short, a skilled faker and ball handler. He was there when it all began.
Otto Graham played for 10 years with the Cleveland Browns beginning in 1946, and the Browns were in a league championship game every one of those seasons. If you’re looking for a record that never will be matched, that’s a good place to start.
He played for a club that outrecruited everyone else (the heart of the post-World War II Browns was a group of service vets who still had college eligibility left), outcoached everyone else and was years ahead of the rest of pro football in organization and innovation. He played for the only coach to have an NFL team named after him, Paul Brown. Brown’s ego reached such a peak that he decided that he, not Graham, would call the plays. That became Brown’s system.
The messenger-guard rotation was introduced in the early ’50s. Brown’s bold move changed the game, even though the innovation didn’t immediately catch on. Many stories of that era mentioned how unhappy Graham was with the arrangement, but he says it wasn’t true. “A lot of people in this world have great egos, but on the Browns there was room for only one ego, and it wasn’t mine,” says Graham, who’s 76 and living in Sarasota, Fla. “I never openly criticized the coach. We had a checkoff system, and occasionally I’d change one of his plays, but as for his calling the game, we never talked about it. He was the admiral, the general, the CEO.
“I’m sure that some quarterbacks couldn’t have played in that system,” says Graham, who twice led the NFL in passing yardage and was the top-rated passer of his time. “I don’t think Bobby Layne could have. But what I loved was that we were a passing team in an era of the run. In the morning we’d work on the run, in the afternoon the pass. What were my talents? I could throw hard if I had to, I could lay it up soft, I could drill the sideline pass. God-given ability. The rest was practice, practice, practice. I had the luxury of having the same receivers for almost my entire career. We developed the timed sideline attack, the comeback route where the receiver goes to the sideline, stops and comes back to the ball, with everything thrown on rhythm.”
In their NFL debut in 1950, the Browns, four-time champs of the rival All-America Football Conference, crushed the defending NFL champion Philadelphia Eagles 35-10. Philly’s 5-2 defense couldn’t cover the sideline comebacks. The Giants scouted that game and, dropping the ends in their 6-1 alignment into linebacker positions, stopped the Browns when the teams met two weeks later. The 4-3, today’s standard defensive set, was born.
“After the game against the Eagles,” says Graham, “their coach, Greasy Neale, said we were nothing but a basketball team. Pretty good basketball team, huh?”
In 1955, after completing an unremarkable career at Louisville, getting drafted in the ninth round by the Pittsburgh Steelers and being released near the end of training camp, 22-year-old John Unitas was the quarterback for the Bloomfield Rams in western Pennsylvania. He made six bucks a game. “They called it semipro football,” he says. “Actually it was just sandlot, a bunch o
f guys knocking the hell out of each other on an oil-soaked field under the Bloomfield Bridge.”
Five years later, after Unitas had led the Baltimore Colts to two NFL championships, Eagles quarterback Norm Van Brocklin was asked what made Unitas so great. “He knows what it’s like to eat potato soup seven days a week,” the Dutchman replied.
Unitas became synonymous with toughness on the field, for stepping up in the teeth of the rush and delivering the ball. “I often thought that sometimes he’d hold the ball one count longer than he had to,” Los Angeles Rams defensive tackle Merlin Olsen once said, “just so he could take the hit and laugh in your face.”
“I kept a picture of Johnny U over my bed,” Namath once said. “To me he meant one thing — toughness.”
How did Unitas change the game? He was the antithesis of the highly drafted, highly publicized young quarterback. He developed a swagger, a willingness to gamble. He showed that anyone with basic skills could beat the odds if he wanted to succeed badly enough and was willing to work.
He’s 65 now, vice president of sales for a computer electronics firm and chairman of Unitas Management Corp., a sports management firm, and the Johnny Unitas Golden Arm Educational Foundation, which awards scholarships. On a sunny day in May, we sat on the porch that overlooks his 19 acres of pastureland in Baldwin, Md., and I mentioned my favorite quote of his: “You don’t arrive as a quarterback until you can tell the coach to go to hell.”
“Once you’ve got (the game) down, you’ve got a better feel on the field than a coach has,” Unitas said. “My first year I was learning. By the end of the second year, it was like a complete revelation, like a cloud had moved away. I’d get a feel for how to move the defense into coverages that I wanted. I’d keep a chart on every defensive back, on his tendencies.
“Weeb Ewbank, our coach, used to be scared to death of (Detroit Lions Hall of Fame cornerback) Night Train Lane. He’d tell me to stay away from him. I thought, Hell, I’m not going to give him the day off. But Weeb was the perfect coach for me because he’d always get players’ input.”
How about the system today with, for instance, the radio receivers that have become standard in quarterbacks’ helmets so coaches can send in plays from the sidelines? “I’d be very deaf,” said Unitas, a three-time league MVP and 10-time Pro Bowl player who still ranks third in career touchdown passes. “Mine would be out of service.”
Unitas thought for a moment. “One of the greatest compliments I’ve ever had,” he said, “came against the Green Bay Packers on a fourth-and-one in a tight game. Before we huddled, I was checking the line of scrimmage to see where the ball was and I heard one of their guys say to Henry Jordan, their defensive tackle, ‘What do you think he’s going to do?’ Jordan said, ‘Damned if I know. I’ve been playing against him for five years, and I haven’t figured his ass out yet.’ That’s what quarterbacks today are missing.”
The hit had been a brutal one, helmet to rib cage, and it had come just as New York Jets quarterback Joe Namath released the ball. Namath was stretched out on the turf of Denver’s Mile High Stadium for a couple of minutes. This was September 1969, a little more than eight months after the Jets had stunned the Colts in Super Bowl III. After the game, no one was more worried about Namath’s condition than Dave Costa, the Broncos’ defensive tackle who had delivered the blow.
As Namath was getting his sore ribs treated, Costa stood in the New York locker room in civvies, just outside the trainers’ room, practically wringing his hands. “Is he all right?” He asked. “Honest to God, I didn’t mean to hurt him.”
I asked him why he was so upset.
“Are you kidding?” he said. “All that Joe has meant to us, to our league, whipping the Colts’ ass the way he did. He’s the reason a lot of us are making decent money.”
In 1965 Namath, then a rookie out of Alabama, spurned the St. Louis Cardinals and signed a three-year, $427,000 deal with the Jets. At that time the contract was the biggest for a pro football rookie. The signing was a public relations bonanza for the struggling AFL. “Ridiculous,” Packers coach and general manager Vince Lombardi said at the time, but the signing war was on. The following year Lombardi topped Namath’s big deal with a $1 million package for a pair of rookie running backs: Donny Anderson ($600,000) and Jim Grabowski ($400,000). Also, the Atlanta Falcons came up with more than $300,000 for linebacker Tommy Nobis, the first player picked in the ’66 draft.
The brash Namath was a shot in the arm for the AFL. In his first season, Jets home attendance increased by more than 12,000 per game. The Houston Oilers set a single-game franchise home-attendance record that would stand for 14 years when 52,680 turned out to see Namath ride the bench in his pro debut. In June 1966 the AFL and the NFL merged.
Then came the Super Bowl, with Namath guaranteeing a victory and then meticulously picking apart a Colts team that was favored by 191/2 points. After having been whipped by Lombardi’s Packers in the first two Super Bowls, the AFL now could look the NFL in the eye. “A bunch of guys from the Chiefs — Buck Buchanan, Emmitt Thomas, Willie Lanier — were waiting at the hotel to meet us after the game,” Namath says. “They just wanted to shake our hands. John Hadl, the Chargers’ quarterback, told me he was sitting in the stands at the game, taking abuse from Baltimore fans, and when we won, he just started crying. Couldn’t help it, he said, and John’s a pretty tough guy.”
Looking back on that Super Bowl almost 30 years later, what did it all mean? “I got letters from a lot of high school coaches who told me they used the game as a motivator,” says Namath, who, in 1967, became the first player to pass for more than 4,000 yards in a season. “Maybe it motivated some other people, too. There are a lot of underdogs in the world. Maybe it meant something to the underdogs in life.”
It was a system built out of desperation, the Bill Walsh system, also known as the Cincinnati system and popularly mislabeled the West Coast offense, whose true architect was Sid Gillman. It was a system that Walsh, the Cincinnati Bengals’ quarterbacks and receivers coach, had installed to accommodate Virgil Carter, a quick-thinking, short-to medium-range passer who became the starter during the 1970 season after Greg Cook went down with an injury.
“I didn’t think of it as a system; it had no name,” Walsh says. “It’s just what we did. Keep the sticks moving with high-percentage passes, get through your progression of reads quickly, make the guy underneath, the guy closest to the passer, your final read.”
The system worked for Carter and his successor, Ken Anderson, and also for Steve DeBerg, the quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers in 1979, when Walsh took over as coach. But when Joe Montana arrived that year, Walsh knew he had something special. “He took the system to a new level,” Walsh says. “His gracefulness on the move, his skill, his resourcefulness, all of that blended into the system.
“We’d have what we called bad-situation practices where I’d take Joe aside and tell him, ‘OK, I want you to go to the third read on every play.’ Then in a game he’d do it, but what made him extraordinary was his innate ability to concentrate downfield with all hell breaking loose around him and then to put the ball in exactly the right spot on perfect timing. It would be like a guy standing on the Speedway in Indianapolis, looking past the cars and throwing his pass.”
“The coolest quarterback I’ve ever seen,” Luckman said of Montana. “Nothing ever seemed to bother him.”
“I’d been throwing on the move ever since high school,” says Montana, who still lives life on the go, traveling the country making speeches and endorsements, and checking out the California wine country for investments. “The beauty of Bill’s system was that there was always a place to go with the ball. I was the mailman, just delivering people’s mail, and there were all kinds of houses to go to.”
The Montana-Walsh legacy in San Francisco is three Super Bowl victories, and Montana would add a fourth under George Seifert. Walsh’s disciples spr
ead the system throughout the NFL, sometimes in modified form but always recognizable. Mike Holmgren took it to Green Bay, where it was perfect for Brett Favre, another quarterback who was gifted on the move. Steve Young, nimble and creative, kept it alive in San Francisco and brought the 49ers one more NFL title. It’s no wonder Young (97.0) and Montana (92.3) have the top two career quarterback ratings in NFL history. No one, however, took the system to a higher level than Montana.
On one glorious January afternoon in 1988 Doug Williams changed the perception of a nation, changed it for all time. He removed an adjective. “When I came into the league,” he says, “I was never Doug Williams, quarterback. It was always Doug Williams, black quarterback. Nowadays you don’t hear that when people talk about Jeff Blake or Kordell Stewart or Steve McNair. They’re just quarterbacks. I like to think I had a hand in that.”
On a hunch, Redskins coach Joe Gibbs had benched Jay Schroeder for the playoffs and started Williams in his place, and now Super Sunday had arrived and Williams would go against John Elway and the Broncos, who were favored by 3 1/2 points. The first quarter ended with Denver leading 10-0. The second ended with Washington in front 35-10. For all intents and purposes, the game was over.
Williams put up eye-popping single-quarter numbers: 228 yards passing, four touchdowns. The struggles of a career — two division championships in five years with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers (still the only titles in that franchise’s history) without much recognition; a two-year stopover in the USFL; a couple of seasons as an off-and-on starter in Washington — had crystallized in one inspired quarter. He finished with four touchdown passes and a Super Bowl-record 340 total yards in the 42-10 triumph and, of course, he was voted the game’s MVP, but what he remembers best is what someone asked him during an interview in the week leading up to the game: “How long have you been a black quarterback?”
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