Dead End Chicago

I keep coming back to the parallels between music and football. Both are full of bad singers (Terry Bradshaw) and bad athletes (Terry Bradshaw). Both have an essential disconnect between reputation and true greatness, and ultimate success versus perceived ability. Both are rife with injustices, and that leads me to my favorite whipping boy in this particular lineup of athleto-musical serfs and vassals, the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame.

The essential disconnect between the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame and reality was brought to the forefront again this past week when I stumbled across Billboard magazine’s list of all-time top Hot-100 performers.

Now, I am the last person to say that chart success should decide who gets into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame – after all, my ulterior motive in writing about the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame is always to point up the essential unworthiness of my one-time favorite band, the Eagles, one of the best-selling bands in history  – but I am also not against factoring in chart success when evaluating hall worthiness. Without chart success, the Beatles would have been, I don’t know, Steeleye Span. Given the benefit of the doubt, Fairport Convention.

Just the same way a great losing quarterback is still a losing quarterback (cf. Jeff George) or a wide receiver who runs the most beautiful routes in the world but couldn't catch fire from a blowtorch is still named Aundra Thompson, a performer with absolutely no direct or indirect chart success is a failure, an experiment of indeterminate nobility that no one cares to repeat. Arthur, Hurley, and Gottlieb. Wilburn Blanchette. Hasil Adkins. Sixto Rodriguez. Out of all the modern-era Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Famers, Leonard Cohen or Tom Waits have had the least amount of chart success, and they’ve sold hundreds of thousands of recordings. They’ve been successful recording artists, just not top-selling recording artists. 

You have to include chart success when considering hall-worthiness. What the Billboard Hot 100 says is completely relevant in these discussions. And when Billboard lists the top 100 Hot 100 artists of the last 55 years, it’s an open invitation to compare the inhabitants of that list to the list of RnRHOF members and see where the discrepancies lie.

No discrepancies at the tippy-top, with the Beatles, Madonna, Elton John, and Elvis Presley claiming the top four spots. After that chart success and Hall of Fame success start to diverge.

Mariah Carey is No. 5. One would think Mariah would make the hall based on her multiple comebacks, her 18 No. 1 records, and her … uh, charms, but she’s borderline – not Madonna “Borderline” or Bette Midler borderline, but somewhere between the two. What did she bring to rock ‘n’ roll that wasn’t there before? Nothing. Mariah is as AORnB as it gets. Softness sells (just ask another inhabitant of the top 100, Olivia Newton-John), but it doesn’t necessarily get you in the golden doors.

Janet Jackson (#7) outpoints her brother Michael (#8) and presents another interesting case. While nowhere near the phenomenon her brother was, Janet has produced a body of music that’s similarly revolutionary, though not as spectacularly revisionist (while introducing that nagging question of who’s most responsible – the performer or the producer – that will nag her and all the Rhiannas and R. Kellys and Katy Perrys to come after).

Assuming Janet and Mariah make it along with Whitney Houston (#9), the next puzzlement shows up at No. 13: Chicago.

Of all the Hall-eligible performers on Billboard’s list, none is as potentially polarizing as Chicago. Voters who vote for Chicago At Carnegie Hall Chicago get “No Tell Lover” Chicago in the bargain. No band’s descent from creative genius to schlockmeisters was quite as precipitous. Genesis came closest, but they started a notch below Chicago and ended a notch above. Plus they had Phil Collins and were British and really pretentious, and they did theme albums. (Think that’s unfair? The Moody Blues were Bread, but they were British and pretentious and did theme albums. Jethro Tull was Jerry Jeff Walker and the Lost Gonzo Band, only British and pretentious, and they did theme albums. Deep Purple was a pretentious, British Blue Cheer that did theme albums. The Electric Light Orchestra was Tommy James and the Shondells with a British accent and a string section, and they did theme albums. The Steve Miller Band and Queen had roughly the same amount of chart success at roughly the same time, but Queen was British and pretentious and – you guessed it – did theme albums. The Moody Blues, Jethro Tull, Deep Purple, and ELO – and yes, Yes – will join Queen in the hall long before any of their American counterparts get so much as a sniff.)

The problem with dismissing Chicago is 1) you can’t ignore the chart success, and 2) you can’t ignore how profoundly they affected popular music.

Chicago is second only to the Beach Boys in overall chart success, and outpoints the Beachers on Billboard’s list. Out of all the bands that tried to make jazz-rock work – Blood, Sweat, and Tears, Pure Food and Drug Act, various Al Kooper efforts, even rockier jazz bands like Return to Forever and the Mahavishnu Orchestra – only Chicago really made it work for more than one album, and people bought into it. Chicago created ambitious soundscapes and challenging pop music that young people listened to, over and over again. I guarantee you that if you were to walk into any band room at any high school in America from 1970 to 1980, when the band wasn’t rehearsing Chicago was playing. Every pep band and a whole lot of stage bands had “25 or 6 to 4” in their repertoire. A lot of pep bands still do, 40-plus years after the fact. Every little combo that played at proms had “Colour My World” as the slow-dance song. “Make Me Smile,” “Saturday In The Park,” and “Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?” were in every song folio bought by every budding pianist, with the song titles written out in that distinctive Chicago script. Especially in the first half of the 1970s, no band combined so much artistic ambitiousness with greater chart success.

Given that, why is there next to no love for Chicago these days?

The music hasn’t aged well. Listening to an entire early Chicago album is a willful act. If you’re not listening to one of the instantly recognizable Chicago songs, you only look forward to the next song because it gets you closer to the end. Still, that’s no different than listening to Caribou, The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway, The Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys, Mystery To Me, and every single Queen album.

Critics didn’t care much for Chicago, but in a shrine that includes Elton John, Neil Diamond, ABBA, Guns ‘n’ Roses, Queen, AC/DC, and the Grateful Dead, the critics eat with the dustman.

Chicago was too prolific for its own good. It released an album a year from 1969-1980, and didn’t have enough high-level jazz-rock material to spread over 12 albums. Successful softer songs (e.g., “Just You ‘n’ Me”) begat more successful softer songs, with less and less innovative, challenging material to balance it out. (Even Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington countered every Helen Forrest ballad with a Ben Webster special.) Terry Kath died in 1978, depriving the band of its center. Post-Kath the band consisted of two softish songwriters (Robert Lamm and Peter Cetera) and a horn section, with session guys like Donnie Dacus holding down the guitar chair. Given Chicago’s loss of its edge and the success of its softer material, it was inevitable that the band would move away from jazz-rock.

Jazz-rock’s demise was equally inevitable. The problem with jazz is that by definition it’s always moving forward. For Chicago to move forward it would have had to have moved closer to Zappa and John McLaughlin and away from commercialism, and Chicago just couldn’t do it. It managed to move a little over five or six albums, and moved more than any comparable band, but in the end Chicago was like one of those Chuck Yeager experimental planes described by Tom Wolfe in The Right Stuff. It couldn’t keep going the direction it was going without blowing itself apart.

Surf music and the sort of prog favored by Genesis and Traffic imploded similarly, but not like jazz-rock. There are still surf bands and prog bands, but there are no more jazz-rock bands to speak of. The genre is for all practical purposes extinct. Chicago is the spitballer of rock bands, and the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame has no desire to recognize the best example of a musical evolutionary dead-end.

It should, though, and so should the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

Here’s what I’m talking about. According to Pro Football Reference, three of the four most highly rated players of all time who aren’t either in the Pro Football Hall of Fame or a sure Hall of Famer are Billy Howton, Billy Wilson, and Bobby Walston, and they all have one thing in common: They were ends who played in the 1950s.

Outside of the Los Angeles Rams, the Cleveland Browns, and (occasionally) the San Francisco 49ers, NFL teams of the 1950s weren’t too sure about the forward pass. If the forward pass was the iPad, most NFL teams of the ‘50s were just getting the hang of the fax.

The breakdown of ‘50s players in the Hall of Fame bears this out. The numbers say that football in the ‘50s was about running backs and line play, with the rise of the defensive back somewhere in there. The 42 HOFers who played primarily in the ‘50s include:

Four defensive ends

Four defensive tackles

Four linebackers

Five defensive backs

Two centers

One guard

Six tackles

Four ends

Four quarterbacks

Eight running backs

The interesting thing about the eight Hall of Fame running backs from the ’50s – Ollie Matson, John Henry Johnson, Joe Perry, Hugh McIlhenny, Frank Gifford, Doak Walker, Charley Trippi, and Marion Motley – is that none were truly transcendental. They range from high-level journeymen (McIlhenny, Perry, Johnson, Matson) to single-wing hybrids, either runner-pass-catchers (Gifford and Walker) or runner-passers (Walker and Trippi). The one remaining back, Motley, was the purest running back, and the best of them all.

The four ends from that same period, Pete Pihos, Tom Fears, Elroy Hirsch, and Dante Lavelli, are undistinguished for different reasons. Fears had three great seasons, all before 1950; Lavelli led the league in receiving only once, in 1946, and that league was the All-America Football Conference; Pihos led the NFL in receiving three straight years, from 1954-56, only after the Eagles moved him from defensive end; and Hirsch’s career was a yo-yo. He caught 66 passes in 1951 and 61 in 1953, but averaged 32 catches a year the rest of the decade.

Howton and Wilson were at least as good as Pihos or Lavelli; numerically, they were better. Walston was a different story, probably the best of the kicker/end combos. However, unlike the rest, Howton did not benefit from having a Hall of Fame quarterback on the other end. (This particularly hamstrung another talented ‘50s pass-catcher, Harlon Hill.) Put Howton on the receiving end of Y.A. Tittle or Norm Van Brocklin’s passes instead of Babe Parilli’s or Tobin Rote’s, and who knows how things might have shaken out.

So if the running backs and wide receivers were not the transcendental offensive players of the ‘50s, who were? Quarterbacks – Otto Graham and Van Brocklin early in the decade, Johnny Unitas and Tittle later on. The game was changing to favor passers; it just wasn’t always immediately apparent. (The rise of transcendent passers also led directly to the development of the three other transcendent positions of the ‘50s: the defensive back, the pass-rushing lineman, and the middle linebacker.)

In many respects the end of the ‘50s was a dead-end (so to speak), just like Chicago. The flanker became the pass receiver of the ‘60s, and the end’s duties were divided between the split end and the tight end. Many ‘50s ends found they lacked either the speed of a split end or flanker or the strength of a tight end. By the late ‘60s, “End” was no longer a position found on football cards.

As it turns out, the Pro Football Hall of Fame and the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame don’t have much use for evolutionary dead-ends. They’d much rather reward those who rode the wave of innovation, regardless of how they got there.

Of Course, You Know This Means WAR

Yeah, I’m back. Don’t get all excited or anything.

The hot stat in baseball is replacement value. It’s expressed in different ways, including WAR, or “wins above replacement,” but its basic premise is this: if you replaced player X on your team with a statistically average player, would he perform better or worse than the player he replaced – and by extension, would the team be better or worse?

Of course, this being a baseball statistic it has all kinds of tendrils – would the team be better offensively? Defensively? Would he hit in the clutch? Would he get on base? Would he throw out base-stealers? Would he give up the gopher ball in late-and-close situations? – but the idea of replacement value really boils down to how close a given player comes to the norm.

Replacement value is semi-self-fulfilling. Successful teams have more above-the-norm players, but it’s not clear whether those teams are successful because they have more above-the-norm players, or more of those teams’ players are above the norm because they’re on successful teams. Success begets performance and vice versa, and don’t forget: “Mother and Child Reunion” was first a chicken-and-egg dish served in a Chinese restaurant.

Football being less stat-driven than baseball (though not for lack of want-to), replacement value is not the hot topic it is on the diamond. Replacement value is less valuable in football because three-quarters of an NFL roster is on the field for one-third of a game or more. Many of those players are going to be at or below replacement value. It’s unavoidable. It’s the definition of the mean in a  world where all the children are above average.

(With all the situational offenses and defenses sometimes you’re better-served looking at the replacement value within a position on a given team – moving from the designated run-stuffer to the designated pass-rusher on defense or looking at the first-down back versus the third-down back. One of the reasons the Giants are so good is that Brandon Jacobs and Ahmad Bradshaw are both above replacement. Ditto for Osi Umenyiora and Jason Pierre-Paul.)

In football, replacement value is good for answering tough questions at the top of the pyramid. Who’s better – Peyton Manning or Tom Brady? How can you tell?

The baseball answer to that, delivered from the pulpit of replacement value, is to take Manning and Brady away from their teams, replace them with a player whose replacement value is at the norm, and see what happens.

That’s a loaded question. Take Albert Pujols out of the St. Louis lineup and there’s an Albert Pujols-shaped hole that can't be filled by Matt Holliday or Lance Berkman. The Cardinals still have to bat nine; they can slip in a Skip Schumaker and go into run-manufacturing mode, but it’s a partial transformation at best. They’re not going to go all bunt-y and start running Berkman like he was Michael Bourn.

Contrast that with football. The most crushing blow to an offense in 2011 outside of Peyton Manning occurred when the Vikings lost Adrian Peterson. How did the ‘Queens react? By not running the same offense at all. Joe Webb got the keys, the passing attack flipped around, the running attack was stood on its head, and while it wasn’t more successful it wasn’t markedly less successful. The point is that given resources and resourcefulness it can be done.

Indianapolis, of course, did none of those things, because it wasn’t built to do them. Joseph Addai and Donald Brown are running backs whose chief asset is not running the ball 30 times a game. They’re the Trevor Hoffman fastball, effective not because it’s used but because it might be used the next pitch … or maybe the pitch after that. The offense built around Peyton Manning could not be rebuilt around anyone else, certainly not Curtis Painter, Dan Orlovsky, or Kerry Collins, and the defense wasn’t good enough to deliver a win when the offense couldn’t outscore the opposition. So on the surface you’d guess that Peyton Manning had the greatest replacement value of any player in recent times.

Not so fast; we still have the Brady-Manning question to answer. Why did the Patriots not disintegrate when they lost Tom Brady in 2008, while the Colts went kablooey when they lost Manning in 2011? Defense is a big part of the answer, and having a defensive coach as head coach. The Indianapolis defense was shredded by injuries in 2011; New England in 2008 had a great defense, with Richard Seymour, Vince Wilfork, Mike Vrabel, Tedy Bruschi, Rodney Harrison, Jerrod Mayo, and Adalius Thomas all playing at a high level. They weren’t the 16-0 defense of the year before, but they were a top-10 defense, and the best defense the Pats have had since.

Even so, the offense was the league’s sixth-best unit, with the same crappy running game that New England has always had. Good receivers to be sure – Wes Welker and Randy Moss – but not really better than Wayne and Garcon and Dallas Clark in Indy. So you think maybe Matt Cassel was better than Curtis Painter?

Maybe a little, but maybe not that much. If Tom Brady’s replacement value is significantly lower than Peyton Manning’s, replacing Brady with Cassel doesn’t hurt nearly as much as replacing Manning with Painter-slash- Collins-slash- Orlovsky. So we come back to the original conclusion: Manning is better than Brady.

Yes, to the extent that his replacement value is higher. You may want Brady over Manning in a big game, and that’s your right. Replacement value doesn’t go there.

All of which is the long way ‘round to the big question: What player is/was the most indispensable to his team?

The simplest way to look at this is to examine the change in record from the year before the player left to the year he left, and then if he went to a new team the difference between the year before the player came and the year he came. A couple of simple change equations, acknowledging that the loss of one player does not define any team’s season.

Let’s work with the top 50 players of all time according to Pro Football Reference, and let’s look at changes that occurred in the meat of that player’s career, if that’s possible.

It gets dicey. Carl Eller and Johnny Unitas changed teams at the tail-end of their careers, when they were close to being replacement-level players. That’s not the same as Marshall Faulk changing teams after three years or T.O. being dealt to the Eagles in the prime of his career.

This little work is split in two, with a list of players who went from one team to a different team this time, and a list of players who didn’t go anywhere saved for the next episode, along with a big wrapup.

Now, the list of players who switched teams.

Lest you think the transition from Brett Favre to Aaron Rodgers was smooth and productive, guess again. The Packers got more than 50 percent worse; the Jets got 125 percent better. And the QB aside, the Favre-led team was nearly indistinguishable from the Rodgers-led team; it wasn’t like the defense collapsed or the offense was gutted by injuries. Favre at that stage of his career was that much better than Rodgers at that stage of his career. It was a big difference.

The difference between Warren Moon and Billy Joe Tolliver was likewise huge. Unlike the calculated move Green Bay made from the old pro (Favre) to his successor (Rodgers), Houston went from a productive star, to a 28-year-old journeyman who could serve as the poster boy for sub-replacement-level quarterbacks. If Curtis Painter were older, less intelligent, and longer off the tee he would be Billy Joe Tolliver. Given that, a precipitous decline was inevitable.

Interesting stuff abounds in these numbers. Love him or hate him, T.O. made the Eagles better and the ‘Niners worse – though he had the opposite effect when he went from Philly to Dallas three years later. Randy Moss, meanwhile, has had the opposite effect everywhere he's gone. Randy Moss is a player whose teams get worse when he arrives. That doesn't mean teams aren't good when Moss arrives, or that they don't prosper at some point during his tenure. They just don't get better when he arrives – and they get better when he leaves.

You can see how two safeties, Paul Krause and Emlen Tunnell, stabilized young defenses, and how three great defensive backs – Rod Woodson, Ronnie Lott, and Herb Adderley – were unable to do much for established defenses.

You can also see that L.T. is a good player. The Chargers may have underestimated how good – or perhaps they simply forgot that addition by subtraction is still subtraction. How could the Chargers without Tomlinson possibly be a better team than the Chargers with him?

And then there's Marshall Faulk. When he went from the Colts to the Rams he pulled off the amazing combination of making his new team nine games better, while the team he left got 10 games better. There has never been an NFL trade that made each team that much better.

This is good, but there's still the Peyton Manning situation to consider. And we will ... next time. 

And I promise there will be a next time.

Packers-Colts: Longing and Belonging and a Fistful of Prop Snow in the Face

If you've been following our all-time playdowns as closely as I am, you're a liar. I'm the freaking author. On the other hand, if you've been following the playdowns semi-closely, you know the Colts' advancing to the semifinals is a point of some contention. People say they shouldn't have beaten the Vikings in the round of 16, the Cowboys in the quarters, or even the Eagles in the first round. Well, they did. They did because while the defense is little more than average the offense is consistently far above average. Put another way, they have not one but several of the most dynamic offensive players in professional football history at a rate of at least one to every position. Tight end, John Mackey and Dallas Clark. Wide receiver, Ray Berry, Marvin Harrison, and Reggie Wayne. Running back, Eric Dickerson, Marshall Faulk, Edgerrin James, and Lenny Moore. Oh, and quarterback, Peyton Manning and Johnny Unitas.

If you're still unconvinced, here's the convincer. According to pro-football-reference.com, the Colts have 13 offensive players among the top 250 players of all time – two in the top 11 (including player No. 1), three in the top 20, four in the top 30. Just doing the math, if there are 32 teams, there should be eight players per team, four on offense and four on defense. Thirteen offensive players from a team means there are more than 200  percent more offensive players from the Colts than from an average team. Throw in five defensive players, and the Colts have 18 of the top 250 players of all time, where the average team has eight – and all that with no Art Donovan, no Bubba Smith, no John Mackey, or no Dallas Clark. That's why the Colts are here.

And if you're unconvinced about the value of Peyton Manning versus his Colts counterpart, Johnny Unitas, consider this: The Colts lost Unitas and nearly won to the Super Bowl with Earl Morrall. The Colts replaced Manning with the closest thing to Morrall the waiver wire had to offer, Kerry Collins, and have nearly won Andrew Luck. Oh, and despite playing most of his career behind Jeff Saturday and an assortment of grain-storage buildings, Peyton Manning is almost never sacked.

The all-time Colts have more than enough line to block for Manning and all that firepower, and just enough defense. So enough about whether they belong. They're there.

Let's compare the Colts to the Packers. The Packers have 14 players in the top 250, eight on defense. (Twelve if you stretch and include Ted Hendricks, Emlen Tunnell, Steve McMichael, and Hardy Nickerson, all of whom spent portions of the back ends of their careers in Green Bay.) So the modern Packers are at a decided disadvantage – and they'd stay at a disadvantage, if we pulled a National Football League and started football time with the merger of the All-American Football Conference.

Unfortunately for the Colts, their time starts with NFL Football Standard Time. The Packers start their football epoch B.C. (Before Cleveland), and by doing that, they up the skill level tremendously. The Packers add the greatest receiver of the prewar era (Don Hutson), three of the best backs (Tony Canadeo, Clarke Hinkle and Blood McNally), and two great linemen (Cal Hubbard and Mike Michalske). Throw those six players in the mix and the Packers have the edge, 19 to 18.

Close game, in other words. Both teams belong, and the game shapes up as an offensive powerhouse versus a strong, well-balanced defense.

Let's play this out.

The Colts get the opening kickoff and go three-and-out. The Packers get the punt and do the same. The Colts take over at their 37 after a decent Lydell Mitchell punt return and Manning goes to work. He hits Wayne, Moore, Berry, Faulk, and Mackey in succession, broken up by a couple of handoffs to Eric Dickerson. The drive takes the Colts to the Packers' 17, where it's third and five.

You know what Peyton Manning throws in these situations like you know your own name. Fade route to Reggie Wayne, touchdown, Colts up seven-zip.

Now it's the Pack's turn. With wide receivers like James Lofton, Sterling Sharpe and Don Hutson working against Bob Boyd and some sugar cookies, Bart Starr doesn't need to be Brett Favre; being Starr is plenty. Starr largely eschews the run in favor of out-routes and screens to Tony Canadeo. The Packers stretch and wedge and ply the ball down to the Colts' eight-yard line. A Gino Marchetti sack pushes the back to the 13. Starr figures if it worked for Manning, why not? He throws his own fade route to Hutson and the game is tied.

Fair enough. The Colts come right back. This time Manning, starting to feel the heat from Reggie White et al., makes better use of draws and screens with Faulk and Mitchell. He wriggles the ball down to the nine and lets Eric Dickerson take over from there. Three straight-and-I-mean-straight runs make it 14-7.

The Packers can't get into a shootout with the Colts, but they're willing to try. Starr continues to exploit the Colts' suspect secondary, in particular on a  57-yard Max McGee route with Hutson playing the part of ol' Max. Jim Taylor bashes it in from the five and we're tied.

Games sometimes veer from flurries of scoring to flurries of ... well, flurries, in the sense of tiny snowflakes being all the announcers have to talk about (except for Kevin Harlan, who never seems to talk about anything). In the case of this game and the Packers, it's Willie Wood, Charles Woodson, and Herb Adderley asserting themselves on the back end of the D and Willie Davis, Henry Jordan and Reggie White asserting themselves on the front. For the Colts, it's using Ted Hendricks as he was meant to be used – as a rogue force playing the whole field.

All of which is a long way of saying that Hendricks blocks a field goal as time expires in the first half, and the Packers and Colts go into halftime tied.

The teams come out in the second half to heavier snow – and if snow isn't Manning's kryptonite it's his triple-decker sauerkraut-and-toadstool sandwich with arsenic sauce. After the Packers go nowhere after the second-half kickoff, Manning makes his first mistake. A pass steered in the direction of Ray Berry ends up in Adderley's hands instead. He returns the interception to the Colts' 39 and the Packers are in business.

It's not much of a business, as it turns out. A pass to Sharpe and a couple of Jim Taylor runs move the ball to the 30, where Chester Marcol is called on to not run with a blocked field goal, and he performs his task admirably, putting the Packers ahead 17-14.

At this point the snow takes over, and Eric Dickerson tries to. He bulls the ball downfield into field-goal range, leaving the kicking duties in the hands of long-time bad-weather kicker Adam Viniatieri.

Now is the time when poetic justice should assume power, and the Green Bay Ted Hendricks should block the kick of his former team, forcing the Baltimapolis Ted Hendricks back out on the field to stop the Packers, but that doesn't happen. Fred Carr doesn't even get an island-sized paw on it. Instead, Viniatieri simply pulls it left.

There's not much after that, fans of offense, lovers of the Washington-Baylor Alamo Bowl. Everyone sort of slips and mucks around for 10 minutes, Manning throws a pick to Dave Robinson, and Reggie White supplies the exclamation point with an exuberant belly-whopper of a sack. The gun fires and the Packers escape with a 17-14 win.

What a gyp! What a dirty, rotten gyp of a game! To have a absolute upset-in-the-making, one of the greatest pretend games in the entire history of made-up football games, ruined by the oldest trick in the book – a blast of stage snow in the face.

Okay, but think about it. The game is played in Green Bay in winter. It snows in Green Bay in winter. One of the greatest real games in history, the Ice Bowl, was played in Green Bay and was made great in part by the temperature. See, it gets cold in Green Bay in the winter. The game itself minus the temperature was no greater than a score of other games. Add the temperature and – voila! – instant classic. And a cup of instant coffee to go with it.

Besides, there's nothing that says the Packers wouldn't have won the game on a dry Green Bay field on a placid Green Bay winter's day. The superior Packers lines and a better Green Bay secondary were starting to assert themselves before the snow. Bart Starr didn't have a multitude of weapons to attack the colts with; he just had the right weapons. You don't need four great running backs and seven great wide receivers; two of the former and three of the latter work fine.

Of all the great players in this game, Sterling Sharpe really stands out. The receiver was on his way to a Hall of Fame career before the neck injury. As it stands, his seven-year numbers compare very favorably to Lofton, Steve Largent, Berry, and Bob Hayes. Sharpe pulls down 11 balls in this game for 117 yards. Hutson is fine – five catches for 87 yards and a TD – but no one matches up with Sharpe.

Dickerson has a nice game for the Colts – 97 yards rushing, mostly in the second half – but Manning's numbers fall off a ledge once the snow starts. He finishes 21 of 38 for 225 yards and two scores, but also an interception and three sacks. Manning's had better games, and that's part of the point. Most of Manning's better games have not occurred in big games in bad weather. This game is completely in character for Peyton Manning and the Colts – even if it took a silly vaudeville prop to do it.

So the stage is set for the last game in our all-time playdowns. Sorry, all you non-traditionalists and disavowers of the NFL's prewar past: It's Packers-Bears.

Let the railleries begin.

Of Greatness, Real And Presumed

In 1950, when the NFL swelled from 10 teams to 12 with the addition of the Browns and 49ers, the NFL must have thought it had invented the sports equivalent of color TV. I mean, 12 teams? The league hadn’t had that many teams since the days when every town in Ohio was required by law to have a team, and a Nesser brother playing on it. Twelve teams was the outer bound of the universe; go any further and one would surely fall off the edge – right?

Possibly. But a funny thing about that huge new NFL. There were 12 teams, and eight HOF QBs. Nine, if you count George Blanda with the Bears.

Think about that for a minute. Twelve teams, and eight or nine HOF QBs.
That would be like every team in the modern NFL having an HOF QB except the Bills, Browns, Jags, Chiefs, Redskins, Lions, Bucs, and Rams. My God! That would make Bruce Gradkowski an HOF QB!

Now, there is a little fudge going on. The Bears had two HOF QBs on the roster in Blanda and Luckman but started Johnny Lujack. The Rams had Waterfield and Van Brocklin and split their snaps. Still, you’d have to think there will never again be a time when the density of HOF QBs is that … uh, dense.

So when you’re smacked in the face with a question like this, you have to ask why. Why were there proportionally more HOF QBs in the ‘50s than any other decade? And once you ask this question you had best strap yourself in for the answers.

The first answer is that the position evolved in the ‘50s, and the game evolved with it. In 1940 teams passed for 13,788 yards. In 1950 they passed for 25,856. For the first time since the NFL’s inception, every NFL team in the ‘50s had a QB who was primarily a passer. More passers meant more passes. More passes meant more passing records. Baugh, Layne, Luckman, Waterfield, Van Brocklin, Tittle, and Graham – and later in the decade, Starr and Unitas -- rewrote the record books. (Trippi and Blanda didn’t.) Halls of Fame recognize rewriters of record books.

Had these QBs played 10 years earlier the game wouldn’t have been ready for them. Had they played 10 years later they would have been Babe Parilli or Frank Ryan.

The second answer is that defenses were slow to catch on. Whenever someone throws three shutout innings in a spring-training game you hear, “Oh, that’s because the pitchers are so far ahead of the hitters right now.” That was the NFL of the early 50s. Frankie Albert was in the shotgun and Norm Van Brocklin was bombing Nagasaki, and Steve Owen was still stuffing nine slow guys in the box. Once the Detroit Lions started to figure out pass defense in 1955 league passing numbers fell fast and far – from 27,593 yards in 1954 to 23,009 in 1955 to just over 21,000 passing yards in 1956. It took the rest of the decade for total passing yards to approach 1950 levels.

The ‘50s also had the greatest concentration of football talent spread among the fewest teams. There were rival leagues at the end of the ‘40s and the start of the ‘60s, but the NFL had the ‘50s all to itself. African-American players finally infiltrated the game, raising the level of athleticism. The perception has been that these HOF QBs were supremely talented players excelling in a realm of supremely talented players. True that, but also realize that pro scouting was in its infancy and the college game was still running antiquated offenses, and many potentially great NFLers went right into beverage distributorship instead of taking the scenic route through Green Bay. It was largely impression that the NFL was at its zenith.

And not just the NFL. The two Golden Ages of Sport in the 20th century were the ‘20s and the ‘50s. Media was infatuated with sport in the ‘50s and got the populace squarely behind them. Red Smith, Jimmy Cannon, Grantland Rice, Bill Heinz, Dan Daniel, and Joe Palmer were spinning the yarns of Mickey Mantle and Jim Brown and building Bobby Thomson into a Scottish Paul Bunyan. Television in the ‘50s put games and athletes into every bar and living room. Cooperstown and Canton (and Toronto, too) are filled with players from these decades who would have lived the life of Ron Santo, minus the squeals, had they played at a different time. Charlie Trippi and Doak Walker had their equals in Hal Newhouser and Bobby Doerr.

In the pro game, the writers were paying attention to quarterbacks and running backs, largely to the exclusion of everyone else. That’s why there were 13 HOF QBs in the ‘50s (counting Trippi and Blanda but not Jim Finks, who made it to Canton on the strength of assets other than his right arm) and 16 running backs (though teams ran the ball less in the ‘50s) against seven HOF receivers, though the ends and flankers were just as responsible for the offensive explosion as the QBs.

So to sum up, in the ‘50s you had the prime movers of hot offenses playing against bum defenses at a time when great writers were in the business of glorifying QBs and everybody was paying attention.

In fact, by the end of the ‘50s every NFL team had had an HOF QB for at least two seasons – except for the Giants, who were coincidentally one of the league’s most successful teams.

If that seems preposterous now, rest assured it wasn’t preposterous then – but only because it wasn’t true. Every Lions-49ers game did not pit a backfield of two HOFers against a backfield of four HOFers, with John Henry Johnson rotating out on passing downs. We’ve simply made it out to be that way.