Long, Long Halls of Pretty-Good-Ness

This is my Finnegan’s Wake. Like James Joyce’s impenetrable opus, this represents a whole lot of work to prove a very simple point – namely, that I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about.

Let me back up. I was scheming, Pinky and the Brain-fashion, how to prove two favorite points: That George Blanda was the most unworthy Hall of Famer ever and the Eagles were the most overrated band of all time.

These are not bad points. Blanda had staying power and a great knack for the dramatic, but he threw the ball to players without consideration for the color of their jerseys. As a producer of net yards and net points for his team he was no more effective than Billy Kilmer or Jack Kemp and far less efficient than long-lived system types like Ken Anderson and Jim Hart.[1]

Speaking of long-lived system types, the Eagles didn’t invent the California sound or even perfect it (listen to “Already Gone” if you want to hear a great song ground to a halt by a complete lack of comprehension of the beat); they simply rode it to reasonable fame and substantial fortune, leaving no clues behind. It's spooky; you go into their back catalog trying to figure out what made them great, and it's like someone stole the good stuff and left behind "Visions" and "Good Day In Hell."

So in considering these favorite targets, I considered their respective halls of fame. The Pro Football Hall of Fame and the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame have roughly the same number of members – amazing, when you consider that rock ‘n’ roll is half as old as long as pro football, yet it's had a hall of fame since 1986. It's less preposterous than an Angry Birds Hall of Fame, but not by much.

This has led the RNRHOF down all sorts of interesting paths. Instead of waiting around 20 years for Chris Brown to become eligible, it threw in Charles Brown. Instead of waiting for Rhianna or Adele, it opted to fill the joint with Jesse Stone, the Dells, Darlene Love, Mo Ostin, the Flamingoes, and Gene Pitney, performers whose pro-football counterparts would be Gil Brandt, Buckets Goldenberg, Gob Buckeye, Ron Wolf, John Brockington, and Norm Snead. That’s not to say these people weren’t instrumental to the growth and development of their vocations, or that they didn’t have their moments. They did – but that’s not the point.

(This is one reason why I hate the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame, though it’s far from the most important one.)

Since the numbers roughly align, you can put the pro-football hall of famers in one column and the rock-‘n’-roll hall of famers in another column and try to match them up. That’s the Sisyphean project I’ve been tackling for the last six months.

Certain things are obvious. James Brown = Jim Brown. Same name, same impact, similar attitude. Dinah Washington = Night Train Lane. Night Train got his nickname by listening to Dinah. Dion = Gino Marchetti. Italian stallions, kings of the streets, looked good in leather jackets, successful, influential, completed each other perfectly. You can see Marchetti running down quarterbacks to the strains of “Runaround Sue.”

It starts to bog down when you have to find a rock-‘n’-roller for Mike Michalske or a football player for Doc Pomus [2]. And the top-heavy nature of rock ‘n’ roll causes some big problems. If Jim Brown = James Brown, who equals Bob Dylan? Who was white and semi-poetic and prolific and incredibly influential? Johnny Unitas? Okay, if Unitas was Dylan, then who’s the Beatles? Bart Starr? It has internal logic, but it’s ridiculous on its face.

The challenges only get worse. If Unitas and Starr are the Beatles and Dylan, who’s the Rolling Stones? The Beach Boys? Muddy Waters? Stevie Wonder? Elvis? [3]

You can argue that I'm comparing two things that shouldn't be compared, and I wouldn't necessarily disagree. Rock 'n' roll is danceable anarchy with sharply defined transition points: Little Richard. Its progress depends on volcanic performers forcibly redirecting the soundtrack of adolescence and dragging society along by the hair. Popular music is also art, and art requires periodic cataclysmic explosions (cf., The Shock of the New).

Pro football, on the other hand, is about incremental change in the service of continuity: Joe Montana to Steve Young. Once you get past Brown and Unitas and Don Hutson and Sammy Baugh, and maybe Dick Butkus, what players broke the mold and changed the game for everyone who came after? The majority of football hall-of-famers achieved success within a system that had already been defined. In that respect, they were a whole lot more like the Eagles than they were like Chuck Berry or Little Richard.[4]

Rock ‘n’ roll is also more inclined to celebrate the moment. Someone could get into the RNRHOF on the strength of the greatest single or album ever. Thirty minutes of brilliance over a 40-minute album is enough: Patti Smith's Horses. But neither Dwight Clark nor David Tyree are getting anywhere near Canton with their versions of “The Catch.”

But to get back to the Eagles – the music Eagles. They’ve been together on and off for 40 years and produced nine Top 20 singles. Bachman-Turner Overdrive did about as well in a decade, and generated a couple of laughs along the way.[5] Looking at the best Eagles songs that do not involve Jackson Browne, only “Hotel California” stands out, and then only as a skillful summary of clichés that permeates the group’s work from “Witchy Woman” on. Take a pinch of “Desperado,” the rhythms of “Tequila Sunrise,” the melancholy of “My Man,” and the guitar sound from “One of These Nights,” and you’re there. [6] 

It's not unfair to say the Eagles were a long-lived and commercially successful band, a popular album band and a middling singles band with negligible influence on popular music or culture.

That doesn't sound overwhelmingly hall-of-fame-ish. It sounds like the pop-music equivalent of an insurance salesman – yet the Eagles were a slam-dunk choice for the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame.

Saying the Eagles are overrated doesn’t get you anywhere. Suppose they are overrated; does that instantly instill dissatisfaction in the 16 million people who bought Hotel California? Even if 10 million of them scream at Glenn Frey halfway through “Life In the Fast Lane,” as I do, “Play the damn lick already!”, the fact is they listened to the song enough to get hugely annoyed by it.

Similarly, saying George Blanda is overrated doesn’t change a thing. His bust isn’t leaving Canton. The sight of his shaggy, sideburned visage plugged with George Washington dentures and heaving steam like a Clydesdale under a stadium cape is an image for the ages. NFL Films isn’t suddenly going to say, “Oh, he’s overrated,” and replace that image with one of Ken Anderson throwing a seven-yard out to Isaac Curtis.

One of the problems with all halls of fame is that they’re levelers. In looking at the two enshrinee lists and matching Traffic with Joe Namath (the low spark of high-heeled boys), or John Mellencamp with Mel Hein (ex-Cougars), the overwhelming impression is that true greatness has been discounted and near-greatness is elevated.

Don’t get me wrong; near-greatness is pretty great. But when the creator of “Pretty Maids All In A Row” is allowed to sit as an equal with the creator of “A Day In The Life,” or when Dick Stanfel, who had a five-year career as an excellent blocker on some so-so teams, is placed on a literal pedestal alongside Jim Brown, it usurps one of the basic premises of life: greatness is a pyramid, and it doesn’t get wider at the top.


[1] The name “Tim Couch” comes up several times in Blanda's career-comps section on Pro Football Reference, as does the name “John Friesz.” And “Bubby Brister.”
[2] It’s hard enough finding contemporary comps within their field for guys like Michalske and Pomus. How many great fullback-guards are kicking around the NFL? And I will never equate Doc Pomus with Swizz Beatz, even if it is logical.
[3] I’ve tried. I have the Beach Boys with Lance Alworth and Red Grange with Elvis. I have Sammy Baugh with Buddy Holly and Dick Butkus with Little Richard. The rest throw me.
[4] You can argue that both systems have already been defined, that pro football is using the same formations it used in 1953 and rock ‘n’ roll is using the same three chords it used in 1954, but that doesn’t mean anything. Nothing has happened in football over the last half-century to compare to what Elvis, Dylan and the Beatles did to popular music. No one stopped speaking to their children because Frankie Albert started throwing the ball out of the shotgun. The streets never filled with disaffected young people running the power-I. Saying the basic chord structures haven’t changed is like saying football players still wear shoes.

[5] The Eagles, meanwhile, accomplished the near-impossible: They turned Joe Walsh into a curmudgeon.

[6] It’s also instructive that the Eagles songs with the greatest staying power come from the solo albums of their members – Joe Walsh’s “Life’s Been Good” and Don Henley’s “The Boys of Summer.” Group efforts tend towards singalongs like “Heartache Tonight” and overblown weepers like “The Last Resort.”


Okay, I read this and realized that I was too much like Joyce for my own good. I was bloviating and declaiming and never getting around to the point. Here's the point: George Blanda was a less successful passer than Dave Krieg and a worse kicker than Nick Mike-Mayer. If you prefer your mediocre talents in a package, Blanda was less productive at what he did combined than Jerry Kramer for certain, and arguably Pat Summerall or Lou Michaels. Of the bunch, Kramer is the most appropriate HOFer based on his accomplishments as a guard, followed by Summerall, for his general contributions to football, then Blanda, and finally Michaels. 

The Eagles were less inventive than Poco, less heartfelt than Dan Fogelberg, less poppy than America, less comfortable with a hook than Andrew Gold, less skilled at choosing (and performing) covers than Linda Ronstadt, less rocking (and adept at rocking) than the Outlaws, less talented than Pure Prairie League, less trippy than Moby Grape or the New Riders of the Purple Sage, less socially conscious than Jackson Browne, less cynical than Warren Zevon, less polished than American Flyer, less devil-may-care than the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, less diverse than the Ozark Mountain Daredevils, less country than Commander Cody, less bluesy than the Sir Douglas Quintet, and less swingy than Asleep At The Wheel -- and nowhere near as influential as the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield or Crosby, Stills & Nash. However, outside of the last three, only Jackson Browne and the Eagles are RNRHOFers, and none of the others are close to being locks. 

And I consider myself an Eagles fan.

Caring, careless, callous, and Karras

I’m going to step away from my annoying-jerk persona for a second and just be annoying. Or maybe just be a jerk. But I’m going to talk straight for a change. If you don’t like it, fine. There are a billion other blogs out there that can fill you up on withering satire and smart-aleck remarks.

Alex Karras is dying. He may be dead by the time I finish this paragraph. His kidneys are failing because his brain is too mixed up to tell his kidneys what to do. Repeated blows to the head over a 14-year NFL career, plus a few-odd wrestling matches, scrambled all the connections and mixed up all the chemicals, and even something as remarkable as the human brain couldn’t sort them out right.

I’ve never been a Detroit Lions fan per se, but I always liked Alex Karras, and if I feel that way I’m sure lots of other people feel that way, too. Karras was smart, funny, a reasonable actor, an underrated sportscaster, the best puncher-of-horses ever, a damn good Hollywood husband, a guaranteed box-office draw on the wrestling circuit, and a hell of a football player.

I’m happy that Jack Butler is in the Hall of Fame. I’m okay with Gene Hickerson being in the Hall of Fame, and getting enshrined when he did before the Alzheimer’s got completely out of control. I’m fine with Tommy McDonald up on the podium in Canton, and Frank Gatski having a statue, and Charlie Trippi, and Doak Walker, and John Henry Johnson, and all the other borderline guys. But dammit, Alex Karras needs one, too.

Let’s look at Alex Karras separated from the emotion of the moment. Karras was a four-time Pro Bowler and a three-time first-team All-Pro during the most concentrated era of football greatness in history. That puts him at roughly the same level as D-linemen like Willie Davis and Henry Jordan, who played on a dynasty and had a mystique working in their favor, way ahead of linebackers like Ray Nitschke and Dave Wilcox, and way, way ahead of modern-day HOFers like Fred Dean and Richard Dent. Pro Football Reference lists him as the 79th-best player of the postwar era, ahead of Huff, Gene Upshaw, Sonny Jurgensen, Night Train Lane, Y.A. Tittle, and sixty-four other Hall of Famers. The only eligible inactives ahead of him are Ken Anderson, Isaiah Robertson, and Jim Marshall.

The man held down the line for some mediocre-to-bad teams and made the guys around him, like Roger Brown and Darris McCord, a whole lot better. Linebackers, too. Especially from the ‘50s through the ‘70s, it was darn hard to be a great linebacker without a great line in front of you. Every HOF linebacker from that era except for Butkus and Wilcox played with a Hall of Famer in the line in front of them.

Make that Butkus, Wilcox, and Joe Schmidt. And Schmidt had Alex Karras. Karras didn’t just make Schmidt better. Guys like Mike Lucci and Wayne Walker and Paul Naumoff cleaned up because Karras was wreaking havoc up front. If you don’t believe me, ask them.

So why isn’t Karras a Hall of Famer? Paper Lion still hurts him, the way Instant Replay still hurts Jerry Kramer. This is a “Christmas Song” line – it’s been said by me many times, many ways -- but the Hornung-Karras gambling suspension fell a whole lot heavier on Karras’ shoulders than it did on Hornung’s. And voters are pretty much done with the ‘50s and ‘60s. There’s a little bit of cleanup work to be done, which is why Dick Stanfel is getting a serious look, but the Pro Football Hall of Fame has moved on to take care of Warren Sapp and Junior Seau and their contemporaries before more of them show up dead in their bedrooms.

It’s too late for Alex Karras, really. For him to be elected in the Hall of Fame now would be hollow and Pyrrhic, as ignominious as Ron Santo being elected to Cooperstown the year after his death.[1] It doesn’t matter to him, and it matters little to the people who look at the numbers, consider the record, and remember. Karras was one of the greats, regardless of what anyone in rust-belt Ohio says.

And I’m not quite done. There’s a personal overtone to this. Last week I learned that a friend of mine, a tremendous natural athlete, one of those fireplug guys with 50,000 volts in their hips – well, his brain isn’t sending the right messages to his organs because 15 years of playing hockey and football scrambled all the wires and chemicals in his brain, and they didn’t get put back together right. It’s going to kill him sometime, sooner rather than later. His kids are nice, and they’re real young. They shouldn’t have to see this stuff happen to their dad.

Listen: The NFL and NHL and the CFL and the NCAA and Aussie Rules Football and the international rugby whatever and maybe FIFA too, they need to deal with this head-injury thing now – not five years from now, not when the technology is completely ready, but this second.

Much as I dislike NASCAR, when Dale Earnhardt died of a head injury they did something, and right away. You can say they did the wrong thing or they didn’t do enough or they waited for a tragedy to act, but when they had to act they didn’t push it under the rug or throw a few thousand dollars at it or call for more study. They made the necessary changes to make racing safer.

Much as it pains me to say this, other sports need to follow NASCAR’s lead. We don’t need more Junior Seau suicides. We don’t need the Hall of Fame to be meaningless for an old man because he can’t even remember his name. And for damn sure we don’t need more kids trying to remember what their father was like when he was really their father.

That’s all.

[1] I’m no Ron Santo fan, but really? People connected with the Hall of Fame must have known for 15 years that they were going to elect Santo someday, and then they watched his body parts fall off and his heart fail and did nothing until after he died? By God, if they do that to Alex Karras I’m going to walk to Canton and put someone  in a figure-four deadfall.

No Mo' Tebow

We’re scarcely two months into the Tim Tebow Era in New York and I can’t wait for it to end. I haven’t felt this antagonistic about a named time period since the George W. Bush Administration.

This is the point where everyone who writes about Tebow positively or negatively has to write about how this is not a reflection on his beliefs, which this is not. Nor is it a reflection on his attitudes toward Brussels sprouts, the size of his adductors, his tolerance for Blue Cheer’s version of “Summertime Blues,” or the shape of his nose. At the same time, we wouldn’t be having this conversation if the combination of his religious hyper-forthrightness and his hyper-collegiate game (shades of Lee Grosscup and Terry Baker!) mixed with a heaping helping of Lolo Jones hadn’t lifted him so far above the other second-/third-string NFL quarterbacks in the public eye that it’s like ants from a Ferris wheel, with running commentary from Rich Eisen.

But speaking of Tebow, and having mentioned Baker and Grosscup, let me quickly and definitively put Tebow in perspective.

From the late 1950s through the 1960s, the passing game evolved to a much greater extent in pro football than in college football. I don’t have a huge suite of numbers to back up my assertions, but I do have these: The first quarterback from that era to win the Heisman Trophy, Terry Baker [1], threw for 1,734 yards. The last Heisman-winning quarterback from that era, Pat Sullivan, threw for 2,012 yards.

By comparison, Tobin Rote threw for 2,003 yards for the 1956 Packers; in 1967, Joe Namath threw for 4,007 yards and Sonny Jurgensen 3,747 [2].

Very few of the best college quarterbacks in football over that time were able to make the transition to the pro game, basically because their collegiate success had nothing to do with their inaccuracy and/or inactivity as passers. Consider these stats from the Heisman-winning QBs of the ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s, and ask yourself where they’d get someone in today’s Heisman race:

They wouldn’t be able to touch Tebow in his Heisman year:

Though they’d put a scare into Eric Crouch, the last true running QB to win the Heisman:

Two Hall of Famers played quarterback and won the Heisman in the years between 1956 and 1971, but they can't really be compared. Staubach, a smart guy to start with, got smarter in his time away from the game, and Paul Hornung didn’t. He also didn’t get to Canton on his ability to fire a 40-yard buzz-bomb to Gary Knafelc with Concrete Charley Bednarik hanging all over him.[3]

Oh, and incidentally: Staubach is only true quarterback to win a Heisman and be a member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

Great college quarterbacks lead great college teams. They are rarely great passers as professional football defines great passers; they are occasionally exceptional runners.

Tim Tebow slots perfectly into this definition. He is the successor to Eric Crouch, Charlie Ward, Pat Sullivan, Gary Beban, Terry Baker, and Johnny Lujack.

He’s also the successor to another hotshot college QB who fell short of the Heisman.

Bobby Douglass came out of Kansas in 1968, the year O.J. Simpson won the Heisman. He was the No. 2 quarterback in the voting and seventh overall, finishing behind Terry Hanratty (another quarterback of a good college team who lacked the right stuff to make it in the NFL) and ahead of Brian Dowling, Yale’s modern-day Merriwell.

You look at the numbers in a modern-day context and wonder what the fuss was about. In his senior year at Kansas Douglass went only 84-for-168 for 1,305 yards and 12 touchdowns, though he did run for 495 yards and another 12 TDs. He ran a high-powered attack; the Jayhawk offense averaged more than 400 yards and 35 points a game in Douglass’ senior year – good numbers even in today’s porous Big 12. You can see why he turned some heads.

The Bears drafted Douglass in the second round and immediately anointed him the successor to no one in particular, since the quarterback position with George Halas was a revolving-door job less important than the backup-right-tackle position.

In his rookie year, sharing time with the demi-immortal Jack Concannon, Douglass passed for 773 yards and ran for another 408. He threw five TD passes, ran for two more, and threw eight interceptions. And his team went 1-6.

This cannot be entirely ascribed to Douglass, just as the Broncos’ 6-1 record in 2012 with Tebow at the helm cannot be ascribed entirely to Tebow. Douglass’ receivers were Bobby Wallace and Dick Gordon; his tight end was also (and mainly) the team’s kicker; and the once-vaunted defense consisted of Dick Butkus (between knee surgeries), Doug Buffone, Ed O’Bradovich, and the same sorts of warmish bodies you find outside a PDQ around 2 a.m. Sunday morning.

Douglass’ numbers suggest Tebow, but what really suggests Tebow is watching Douglass in action. The surviving footage engenders a feeling of dumbstruck amazement usually reserved for people who consent to have cannons fired into their abdomens. Like Tebow, Douglass was a lefty, and also like Tebow, Douglass was mechanically challenged. He couldn’t duplicate his motion if you made him play on a Xerox machine.
With that said, no matter what angle Douglass threw the ball from it could travel. There’s footage of him throwing a 60-yard dart on the run to a wide-open Jim Seymour, and in interview footage he said he could throw a football 100 yards in the air.

Tebow’s Achilles heel is direction; Douglass’ was touch. If a ball left Bobby Douglass’ hand traveling in the general direction of Austin Denney or Mac Percival, it was likely traveling at a rate of speed approaching escape velocity. Chuck Yeager piloted slower projectiles.

Douglass was also by his own admission not on exactly familiar terms with the playbook. The most popular play with Douglass at the helm was the broken play. Some of those plays turned out remarkably well, in the sense that it takes NFL Films several minutes to show a single play from start to finish; however, an offense built around the broken play is ultimately a broken offense, doomed to failure.

It also drives coaches nuts. Douglass’ career was marked by numerous benchings in favor of lesser talents who could run the plays, pedestrian as they might have been.

Douglass’ 1970 season was cut short by a broken wrist (though he did throw four TD passes with that broken wrist in the one game he played), but 1971 and ’72 represent the zenith of Douglass’ career. In those years he threw for 2,400 yards and ran for 1,200, with 25 combined touchdowns and 27 interceptions. His teams went 7-18.

Douglass sits at the extreme end of the running quarterback in the saemi-modern NFL, but it’s there where the most valuable lessons are regarding Tim Tebow. It also says something larger about running quarterbacks in general.

There have been almost 50 Super Bowls, and quarterbacks generally classified as running quarterbacks have won none. Several very mobile quarterbacks have won Super Bowls – Steve Young, Aaron Rodgers, John Elway, Brett Favre, Staubach – but no quarterback from the Randall Cunningham/Cam Netwon/Michael Vick school has won a Super Bowl [4]. The game’s continuing evolution almost assures that a runner will win a Super Bowl someday, but someday may be further off than you think.

The reason for running QBs’ lack of ultimate success can be found by watching them in pivotal games. At some point in these big games the decision for a running quarterback whether to pass or run is so equivocal, because they’re so good at both skills, that they either make the wrong choice or no choice at all. With a quarterback that only runs when forced, the decision is unequivocal. They run so they can pass. The decision is simpler, and because it’s simpler it’s made more quickly, and it’s usually the appropriate decision.

The Canadian Football League is a running-quarterback’s league, but for the last several years the most successful team has been the Montreal Alouettes, and its quarterback, Anthony Calvillo, only runs when forced. Fewer decisions equal better decisions.

So the career equation for Tim Tebow appears to be lack of pro success (because of college success not translating into pro success) + more lack of pro success (because of lack of appropriate tools to engender pro success) = early departure from the NFL. Likewise, all you lovers of Robert Griffin III’s week-one performance may want to take a seat for another decade. As my hardcore-49ers-fan friend Tom said yesterday as we were driving to the Packer game, “They have to be taught quarterback before they can win.” There’s a lot of truth to that.


[1] Paul Hornung doesn’t count, as you’ll see.

[2] I’m being selective here. By the end of the ‘60s the aerial circus that was the AFL was no more and pro football entered a sort of Dark Ages dominated by running backs. A quarterback wouldn’t throw for more than 4,000 yards until Dan Fouts in 1979. And strangely enough, college football followed that pattern right along. College football in the '70s was an endless progression of wishbones and power-I's and veers. After QBs won seven of the 12 Heismans from 1960-71, they wouldn’t win another until Doug Flutie in 1983.

[3] And don’t get me started on what did get Hornung there.

[4] You can throw Joe Kapp in there, just because.

The West Coast Offends -- and Montana Takes Advantage

The obvious thought is that the 49ers were fortunate to have five great quarterbacks in Frankie Albert, Y.A. Tittle, John Brodie, Steve Young, and Joe Montana. But when you consider that any of these quarterbacks could have been the starting quarterback or at least #1a for the all-time Chicago Bears or several other teams, the question shifts. The question becomes, "Why?" Why were the 49ers the recipients of all this bounty and not the Bears, or the Steelers, or the Lions, or a half-dozen other teams? It can't be entirely because the personnel was there; it has to be because someone coaching the 49ers, or several people, had new and better ways of playing football involving the quarterback.


As we’ve mentioned earlier, rarely does a professional football team pull off a successful 180-degree flip[1]. Change tends to be incremental and evolutional. Offensive genius attracts offensive genius. Frankie Albert hired Red Hickey in 1954. Why? Because Albert related well to offensive minds and Hickey had a good one. Never mind that Hickey was a bootlegger and Hickey was more of a free-thinker. The basic idea – moving the ball down the field via the pass – was the same.

The problem with the Niners through the ‘60s and early ‘70s was that they had defensive coaches coaching a basically offensive team. Bill Walsh brought innovative offense back to a team that thrived on offensive innovation. The dark years after Walsh, Seifert and Mariucci were the result of defensive thinking applied to an offensive team -- which is why Niners fans ought to be so excited about Jim Harbaugh. He is the right person to coach the Niners, and the Niners are the right team for him to coach.

So taking this thinking back to Joe Montana, it’s not that the 49ers were fortunate to have so many great quarterbacks. They were fortunate to have so many great offensive minds to work through their quarterbacks to produce results.

It’s definitely more this way than the other. The records of the five QBs listed above when they weren’t with the Niners was 63-59-4 (counting Albert’s year in Canada and Young’s with the L.A. Express); take out Tittle’s years with the Giants and the record drops to 31-46-1.

Montana would probably not have been a Hall of Fame quarterback had he landed with the Bears, the Steelers, the Cardinals, the Bills, or a score of similarly defense-minded teams. While I realize many football fans view Montana with a reverence approaching Joe DiMaggio in baseball or John Havlicek in basketball, the reality is more pedestrian: He was more lucky to be a Niner than the Niners were to have him as a quarterback.

 
[1]So all you folks who think that Robert Griffin III is going to transform the Redskins into the 21st-century Niners might want to hold off for a couple of years.

The West Coast Offends

One of the things people get wrong with the San Francisco 49ers is the whole West Coast-offense thing.

The way the legend goes is that Bill Walsh came to town with a phenomenal new scheme called the West Coast offense and revolutionized a moribund attack and suddenly it was okay to say bad words on records. Or something like that.

What a bunch of rubbish.

The fact is that the San Francisco 49ers have always run a West Coast offense, in one or another of the ways that term has come to be defined. The West Coast offense out of the shotgun? Buck Shaw and Frankie Albert ran that in 1951. Five-yard dumpoffs to the running backs? That's how Hugh McElhenny got to Canton. McElhenny finished his career with 264 receptions. The only contemporary running backs who caught as many passes were Bobby Mitchell and Frank Gifford, and they spent most of their careers as actual flankers. Big possession receivers? San Fran had two of the best in six-foot-three R.C. Owens and six-foot-four Bernie Casey. Passing to the tight end? Dave Parks led the league in receptions in 1965, with John Brodie passing and Jack Christiansen in charge.

Brodie was a prototypical West Coast offense quarterback: short drop, quick release, short patterns, limited mobility. Brodie led the league in passing yards three times. He led the league in yards per completion once -- 1961, a complete aberration of a season.

From the time the 'Niners entered the league until 2002, the last good year of their run, the San Francisco offense was always more multidimensional than most, always full of backs who could catch, always willing to use the short pass as a surrogate run.

Like television or the iPhone, the West Coast offense was less revolutionary than evolutionary, a successful synthesis of elements that had already been tried. The only difference between the West Coast offense and the Run 'n' Shoot  is that the West Coast offense worked in the NFL.

The Run 'n' Shoot might have worked in the NFL; there was nothing inherently flawed about it. All it needed to succeed was the right coach and the proper personnel. The West Coast offense had Bill Walsh, and after a couple of years it had the people to make it work. But perhaps most importantly, it had a team used to such stuff.

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.

Better, Not Best

In light of Alex Smith finally seeing the aforementioned twirling bright object, a brief appraisal of the relative merits of the 'Niners' greatest quarterbacks, Joe Montana and Steve Young.

You ready? Here it is: Montana is the best quarterback in 'Niners' history, but Young is better.

There's no question that Steve Young is a measurably better QB than Joe Montana. Measurably better. Young is fifth all-time in yards per passing attempt. Montana is 23rd. Young is second in passer rating. Montana is eighth. Young is 18th in postwar player value, meaning he was the 18th best player at any position to have played since 1950. Montana is 31st. Montana is 24th in passing yards/game while Young is 42nd, but Young has a better completition percentage, a better interception percentage and a better TD percentage.

By any measure of the things you want a quarterback to do -- complete passes, gain yards, throw TD passes, and avoid interceptions -- Young is better. So why is he second fiddle to Montana and destined to always be second fiddle to Montana? Because Montana got there first. Montana threw the pass that led to The Catch, and he led the 'Niners to their first Super Bowl win. The fact that he's a Notre Dame kid doesn't hurt, either. You can't quantify it, nor should you try.

The gulf in popular perception is so wide that it can't even be bridged by their vastly different post-football paths, where Young has shown himself to be one of the most thoughtful and well-spoken athletes to ever have received mutliple concussions, while Montana treads a line just north of Pete Rose-dom.

It's unfortunate that Young will always be 1A to Montana's 1 because it needlessly degrades Young's substantial accomplishments, but it makes a case for what "better" really means.

Maynard, Saner

About a year ago, in writing a segment on the New York Jets, I wrote the following on Don Maynard:

“So how good was Don Maynard really? He had an HOF QB throwing to him, yet he was only a first-team All-AFL pick once, never all-NFL anything, and only a four-time AFL All-Star. Not to put too fine a point on it, but through most of Maynard's best years he wasn't even the best wide receiver on his team. George Sauer was a four-time AFL All-Star and a first-team All-AFL pick twice before walking away from the game after six years to wear a turtleneck and channel Tom Wolfe. Maynard was there for the Al Dorow years and hung around through most of the Namath era and was rewarded with an HOF bust, though he was clearly inferior to Sauer when the two played together. Maynard had speed and hands but was not a disciplined route-runner. Sauer had speed and hands and ran routes. Maynard was good and durable but clearly not great. In that respect he resembles Harold Jackson or Isaac Curtis, two receivers who are close to the Hall of Fame but not in, and not likely to get in.”

Permit me the luxury of reconsidering.

Certain aspects of the above statement are indisputable. Maynard was not well thought of during his career. For half of his career peak he was the most productive player on a woefully unproductive team. He was a headstrong west Texas cowboy adrift in New York City, continually criticized for running undisciplined routes and having so-so hands. (“A stubborn nonconformist who fumbled,” was Sports Illustrated’s take.) When Joe Namath arrived, it was the passes that were spectacular, not so much the pass-catcher.

But if you accept the notion that Don Maynard was the overrated split end catching passes from the overrated quarterback Joe Namath, then the question is, “How bad was Don Maynard? Otis Taylor bad? Gary Garrison bad? Dee Mackey bad? Jerry LeVias bad?”

Fortunately, there are ways to answer that question.

First, I took all the Hall of Fame wide receivers from the late 1950s through the early 1970s, plus a few others, and broke down their stats. I focused on four things: yards per catch first, then receptions, then touchdowns, and finally yards.

The order’s important. Since I don’t have a stat that measures targets, yards per catch is the only measure of a receiver’s effectiveness. A quarterback passes the ball in a calculated risk that he will gain a significant amount of yards, mitigating those instances where the passes falls incomplete and gains no yards. (Or, to revisit the Woody Hayes Perspective On Passing, those instances where the second bad thing happens and the quarterback throws an interception.) A quarterback that completes two-thirds of his passes for an average of 10 yards per completion has reached a state of perpetual offensive motion. He could conceivably move up and down the field at will. If a given receiver delivers 15 yards a catch compared to an average receiver’s 10, he’s much more efficient and therefore much more valuable.

Here’s what I mean. Lance Alworth averaged 19.5 yards per catch during the peak of his career. Lionel Taylor averaged 12.7. Taylor had to catch 50 percent more passes than Alworth to match Bambi’s production. Not surprisingly, Alworth was and is considered to be the more valuable of the two receivers.

You could argue that by catching more passes for fewer yards per catch Taylor was actually more productive, since he kept more drives going, but the counter to that is first, Alworth also caught more balls per year, and second, Alworth also had twice as many touchdowns. Taylor was nowhere near as productive as Alworth, and that’s why Taylor is not prime HOF material.

The other reason to look at yards per catch is that it takes the quarterback out of the equation to an extent. Maybe Lionel Taylor’s production suffered because Frank Tripucka and an assortment of dead-armed sphere-chuckers were entrusted with getting him the ball – but, hey, every time someone got Taylor the ball he churned out fewer yards than most tight ends. Sure, it could be that the Broncos of the ‘60s ran a lot of underneath routes because those were the only routes the quarterback could throw, but the production of Al Denson and others suggests otherwise. Lionel Taylor simply wasn’t much of a RAC guy. If you’re looking for a semi-contemporary contemporary, think Art Monk. If you prefer a contemporary who’s truly contemporary, try Hines Ward.

Receptions are important because they show how many times a receiver was achieving that big RAC. Alworth is the top receiver of the ‘60s because he caught as many passes as anyone for more yards and touchdowns than anyone. Conversely, it took Bob Hayes extra time to make it to Canton because he only caught 45 passes a year in his best years, even though his RAC and TDs were just a tick behind Alworth’s. Also remember that the pass was still largely a gambler’s play in the ‘60s; the notion of the pass as a tool for extending possession was just being formulated and accepted.

Finally, touchdowns reflect the ultimate goal of throwing passes and gaining yards: winding up in the end zone. Not to bash Lionel Taylor, who happens to be one of my favorite players from the AFL days, but five TDs a season on top of everything else pretty much deep-sixes his chances of getting to Canton. On the other hand, anything between eight and 10 TDs sustained over a seven-to-10-year career gets you noticed.

So enough of the preliminaries. Where does Don Maynard rank? Let’s go to the chart:

Well, maybe Maynard doesn’t suck after all. Taken in the highly appropriate context of where he sits with his contemporaries and measured on the basis of his best years, Maynard comes out second only to Alworth among ‘60s receivers. Oh, and he absolutely blows the doors off of George Sauer.

(Just so you know, we went apples-to-apples here. We compared continuous peak years, throwing out the tentative first years and the on-the-skids last years. These figures show what you might reasonably expect from these receivers when they were in the prime of their careers.)

This chart does no favors to the receivers who aren’t in the Hall of Fame. Harold Jackson, for all his longevity, never got much better than this. Jack Snow, who isn’t on the chart, posted some great yards-per-catch numbers but just never caught enough balls. Think of him as a poor man’s Bob Hayes, with a guest shot on The Beverly Hillbillies. The same, minus the Hollywood, applies to the underrated Carroll Dale. Ten years later they could have been Cliff Branch. Otis Taylor had decent RAC numbers, but again, he was never the target the way Maynard or Alworth was.

There are a few mitigating circumstances to consider, but not many. Hayes and Maynard were very much alike in the sense that they were old-school bomb receivers, more of a piece with Tom Fears and Harlon Hill than the Charlie Joiners and Jerry Rices to come. They were not modern receivers, but no one said they had to be.

Considering durability, competition and production, Don Maynard is one of the best three wide receivers of the ‘60s. Forgive me for suggesting otherwise.

Curtis Martin: The Malcontent's Moment

Most of the time running backs coming out of college with bad reps fully justify those reps. In fact, they often go out of their way to justify their reps. Lawrence Phillips? Choking the woman in the bar was sheer genius. Ricky Williams? You had a feeling the NFL wasn't ready for Peter Tosh, and you were right. Cedric Benson? His only faux pas was not getting arrested in grand style, in Chicago, on a Great Lake. Maurice Clarett? Rashaan Salaam? Brent Moss? Brent Fullwood? Duane Thomas? Joe Don Looney? The defense rests.

Ah, but ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the prosecution calls Curtis Martin. Martin was a first-round talent drafted coming out of Pitt, but was drafted in the third round because of concerns over his work ethic. You know where those concerns usually wind up: Larry Kinnebrew. Well, it never happened. Instead, Martin became respected for his diligent work habits and overall intelligence -- the anti-Phillips, so to speak.

Arguably the best NFL free-agent signing ever and definitely one of the top five free-agent signings in New York sports history, Martin signed a big-money deal with the Jets so he could stick with Bill Parcells, and he delivered seven straight 1,000-yard seasons. He's the Jets' all-time rushing leader, the star of this year's Canton class, and a quality individual, but consider all the damage he's done. Thanks to Martin, drafting a malcontent like Travis Henry makes sense. On the other hand, that's why God made Cincinnati start with "sin."

Charley Ane One

The role of first-ins is misunderstood. People sometimes think if the first person to do something or be something had not done or been it, then nobody would have. For instance, if Alexander Graham Bell had not shouted "Watson, come here" into a mess of steel reeds we'd all be restricted to text-messaging on our Blackberrys.

Actually, first-in is more a matter of circumstance than being so far out there that you're off the GPS. Bell did the best job of summarizing the existing science and wrangled a patent for the lot. Fact is, several people not named Bell have a legitimate case to be designated as the Inventor of the Telephone. The problem is, of course, what to do with all the postage stamps in all the stamp albums.

Jackie Robinson was Jackie Robinson, but if there hadn't been a Jackie Robinson there'd quickly have been a Roy Campanella or a Monte Irvin. Much is made of the fact that Jackie Robinosn had the perfect temperment to break the color barrier, but Irvin or Campanella would have sufficed just fine.

Charley Ane was the first Polynesian pro-footballer, and everyone from Haloti Ngata back to Mosi Tatupu should give a nod in his direction, but if there hadn't been a Charlie Ane there'd have been someone else, as soon as there was someone who made sense. You can always make a case that sure, colleges should have done a better job recruiting American Samoa and yeah, the NFL should have made a better effort to scout the Pacific Rim, but heck, Minnesota was lucky if it could track down the best kid in the Iron Range every year and the NFL was too busy overlooking Otis Taylor to be bothered with Polynesia.

It wasn't conscious exclusion; it just happened, and it's still happening. Stanford doesn't get the best halfback in Guinea-Bissau, and the NFL's scouting presence in the Falkland Islands is mediocre at best. Just count your blessings that Charlie Ane was discovered in Hawaii and got to go to USC and was scouted by the Lions and got a chance, because he was a fantastic lineman, whether at center or tackle.

HOFtime

Now that we're through the all-time playdowns and in the midst of that sleepy time of year, I thought I'd throw out the names of some non-Hall of Famers for your consideration.

Are these guys Canton-worthy? Depends about the part of Canton you're talking about, and whether you really mean Canton, Ohio, or The Huge, Stinking Chinese City Formerly Known As Canton. But they deserve to be in one of those conversations, alongside the moo goo gai pan.

Here you go.

Bobby Dillon: Just because Sammy Baugh and Don Hutson could play D-back doesn't mean it was easy, not with the Messrs. Fears and Hirsch and Lavelli and Speedie bearing down on you and the position itself going through full-on puberty. Through the mid-'50s, when the Packers' front seven consisted of Hawg Hanner and Clayton Tonnemaker flanked by large cardboard cutouts, Bobby Dillion was supporting Val Joe Walker, Jim Psaltis, Veryl Switzer, and Clarence Self in the defensive backfield. By any measure Dillion had his own work cut out for him, yet he excelled -- four times All-Pro, five times Pro Bowl. On a better team this was Canton material. On the Packers of the mid-'50s it was self-preservation.

Steve Tasker: If a healthy disregard for sanity is a prerequisite for playing special teams, Steve Tasker's disregard was Jack LaLanne healthy. It was selling carrot juicers to all the other special-teams' guys disregards. This was fortunate for Tasker, as there are few jobs not being held by North Koreans where disregarding sanity pays so well. Tasker was the Kim Jong Il of the special-teams' world, not because he came to work in a Hongqi V12 or launched pre-emptive nuclear strikes against Vai Sikahema, but because he didn't give a rip what western civilization said, he was going to disembowel Elbert Shelley if it was his last act on earth, and damn the U.N. sanctions. Such miscreance is usually only found on SpikeTV, but it got the dude seven Pro Bowl appearances, and if they ever figure that screaming down the field 10 times a game like a candidate for the rubber room is enough to get you immortalized a short drive away from The Rubber City, Tasker is so there.

Jim David: At some point with the Detroit Lions' defensive backfield you have to ask how much of it was the reputation and how much was the players. From 1949 to 1967 the Lions had at least one All-Something D-back. From 1952 to 1963 they had two or more. Now granted, the Lions essentially defined modern D-back philosophy, and granted, the Lions stuck some tremendous players in their D-backfields. But was Jim David All-Pro for six straight seasons in the '50s because he was that good, or because the system was that advanced? With the exception of Night Train Lane, none of the Lions' D-backs played much anywhere else, so it's hard to judge. There's definitely something to the system, however. Other teams that followed it, most notably the Lombardi Packers, churned out All-Pros and HOFers, though never to the extent of the Lions. It's like the Lions discovered something that no one else could figure out or find for a decade. It's perplexing, and it really took the AFL to bring pro football around to something the Lions had known since 1951.

Dave Robinson: Three Pro Bowls, four times all-something, could match Herb Adderley stride-for-stride in a straight-line race … based on athletic ability alone, Dave Robinson would be the all-time-great Packer linebacker you'd pick first -- and then your team would be mediocre because Ray Nitschke played like a guy who missed his appointment with the exorcist. But Dave Robinson certainly had it all.

Neil Smith: Lest you think I'm just Jackson Pollock splash-painting with football words, this thing about the strength of a team resting in its lines really exists. You can prove it using a spreadsheet and the simplest of analytical tools: your brain. Go to pro-football-reference.com. Call up the page that lists current teams and their all-time records. Copy it and dump it into an Excel spreadsheet, then eliminate all the extraneous stuff, such as the all-time leading receivers for the various teams. Sure, there’s some hungover eyebrow-raising to be done at the revelation that Eric Martin is still the Saints' all-time leading receiver, but that only proves that records truly are made to be broken. Once the non-essentials have been banished to Deleteville, sort the teams by won-loss percentage, with the winningest teams at the top. You should wind up with a spreadsheet that starts with the Chicago Bears and ends with the Houston Texans. (It's not a straight oldest-to-youngest search, thanks to those Terry Feltons of the football world, Detroit and ChiStlAz.) Now, go though the spreadsheet and identify the part of each team that has historically been the strongest -- QB, RB, O-line, D-line, LB, DB,WR, special teams. Do that and you wind up with nine of the 10 best teams characterized by at least one dominant line -- and the teams have been able to perpetuate those lines over time and changes in personnel, rules, game play, and coaching staffs. You can win some games with a great QB, about as many with a great RB, proportionally less with great pass-catchers and D-backs. But you ain't perpetuating nothin' unless you're committed to building powerhouse lines every season, regardless of coach or quarterback. And while Kansas City isn't the winningest team out there, its whirpool runneth over with really solid D-linemen like Neil Smith -- a stout run-stuffer, a sack machine, and very, very comparable to Buck Buchanan. If you're wondering what a perennially great team is made of, here's your answer: Neil Smith. Four Neil Smiths, ideally.

Tom Sestak: By all accounts Sestak, who died young, was an absolute monster. His coach, Lou Saban, said Sestak was "one of the best I've ever seen, on any field, in any league ... for strength, interior pass rush, ability to read offensive keys, instinct to fight off traps, and raw courage." His knees were goulash but his upper body was like the palisades, and he could one-arm-tackle anyone, even bruisers like Jim Nance. The nearest thing to Sestak in today's game are Minnesota's Williamses, but Sestak was better. And less heralded, but that's Buffalo.

Maxie Baughan: This is a head-scratcher. You don't figure, do you, that the NFL is holding down Maxie Baughan because he slept with an assistant coach's wife when he was head coach at Cornell? Isn't that what assistant coaches (and their wives) are for? But it must be that, because there are a bunch of HOFers besides Trippi and Hornung with worse credentials than Mad Max. Consider that Baughan was All-Something nine times out of 10 in the Decade of the Linebacker, when teams finally concluded that, hey, it's pretty neat to have a guy who runs up into the hole and tackles Tucker Fredrickson for a loss and runs back and nails Aaron Thomas in the ribs when Gary Wood overthrows him. Nine times out of 10 for Baughan beats Dave Wilcox's seven, which is not the same thing as Baughan being better than Wilcox. If Baughan had laid down these numbers playing the middle instead of the outside he'd have been in Canton 20 years ago, because the Decade of the Linebacker was all about the middle. Just because Sam Huff was miked and Ray Nitschke had a steel plate in his head and Dick Butkus screamed at people and Tommy Nobis was the most fought-over No. 1 draft pick ever middle linebackers got an aura in the '60s, even though they were playing a position that five years earlier centers played in their free time. That stinks for Baughan, who really was a corker.

Bill Forester: Bill Forester may have been better than Ray Nitschke. Contemporary measurements say so; All-Pros are three-to-one in favor of Forester, and Forester has a 4-3 edge in Pro Bowls. Forester doesn't have as many rings and he spent more years playing nose tackle, of all things, on rotten teams, but he was Lombardi's first choice for defensive captain over Nitschke. Let's call it a draw then, except for one thing: Nitschke's one of the all-time greats and Forester nuzzles up to Brian Noble in the Packer Hall of Fame. Fairly unfair, in other words.

Alex Karras: The case is clearer with Karras, who deservedly or not served a one-year suspension for gambling in 1963, along with Paul Hornung. Gambling has always been the big stop stick in the road for halls of fame, and Karras hit it full-on – though, it must be noted, it didn't stop his partner in alleged crime. But with Karras, there was also Paper Lion, and the movie where he punched out the horse, and the other movie where he played a gay bodyguard, and the goofy TV series where he wore an apron, and, and ... and the lesson here, kiddies, is that if you want to have your cake and eat it too, relax, be patient, and always remember to play for Vince Lombardi. Think about this, though: At the time of their suspensions, what would have been the over on who would have the longer acting career: the curly-haired Golden Boy with the dimple, or the brick-shaped, stolid Greek? Gyro Boy’s upset win is the Jets-over-Colts of football-to-acting transitions.

Winston Hill: Hill was an accomplished tennis player, so ostensibly he was better than Franco Harris, whose tennis game was not much different from his football game (meaning that, yes, he sent it out of bounds every chance he got). Just the mere fact that Hill played tennis tells you something about him: He was very nimble as offensive linemen go, even by '60s standards. Hill was listed at 6-4 and 270 but played around 250. He made all-Star games eight times, or about four times more than he would have made it in a unified NFL, but he was probably one of the 10 best AFL linemen. The fact that he was able to stand up to the Bob Lillys and Bubba Smiths after unification tells you how good he was. And you'd best stay away from his overhead smash.

Packers-Bears: The Pretend End of the Pretend Road

At last, to paraphrase my minivan, we have arrived at our destination. Route guidance will cease. Enjoy your stay.

I can’t remember why I decided to pursue an all-time-greatest-teams playdown. Oh, wait; I do. I had spent many months analyzing NFL teams and constructing all-time lineups as part of the process of writing a book called Jim and Kit’s Big Book of All-Time Football Lineups (note to self: whack the title), and once I had a sufficient supply of lineups and snide Leo Sugar references I felt duty-bound to do something with them, and if the book wasn’t happening the playdown was a reasonable second choice.

I suppose I could have just thrown a bracket up there and given it the Colin Cowherd treatment and run an illegal gambling operation and had everyone in the office chip in a twenty to play, but that’s not how I operate. Long and overblown, baby, with absolutely no income potential: that’s Big Kitty Style.

So I started this thing on May 20, 2011, with a running account of Chargers-Chiefs, and almost 235 days later to the day here I am, playing out a post-Pro Bowl finale featuring the Bears and Packers banging leather helmet against leather helmet in a commercial-free, flyover-less, non-Kevin Harlaned paean to the wonders of football longevity.

Let’s nuke the hecklers right away, because Lord knows I love explaining once again how the two overwhelming favorites to get here got here.

Forget that one of these teams is in my backyard and the other is just over the fence. The Bears are here because over 90-plus years they’ve assembled more high-quality linemen on both sides of the ball than anyone. Anyone; not even close. The Bears also have four Hall of Fame running backs, five Hall of Fame linebackers, the two greatest kick returners ever, and pro football’s very own Babe Ruth, all coached by the guy who gave the NFL CPR for a decade.

The Packers are here because it snowed.

Well, more than that. The Packers are here because they have four great quarterbacks, three tremendous wide receivers, six HOF running backs, the highest-rated defensive player ever (Reggie White), a slew of HOF linemen and three HOFers in the secondary, with Vince Lombardi driving the bus.

And because it snowed.

The Packers and Bears are 1-2 in all-time wins, and first and fourth in all-time winning percentage. They are 1-2 in Hall of Famers, and between them they have 22 World Championships – almost one-fourth of all NFL titles. Lest you think it’s merely a function of longevity, the other team that was there at practically the beginning, the ChiStlAz Cardinals, has two NFL championships and no Super Bowl wins, and the rest of the pre-1935 teams – the Lions, Eagles, Redskins, and Giants – have been the Pimlico clay to the Packers and Bears’ Secretariat.

Oh, there are differences. The Packers were never coached by anyone as large as Abe Gibron, though Mike Sherman's astonishing paunch-that-launched-a-thousand-ships wins extra points for its shock value. The Bears peaked earlier than the Packers; the team has two championships in the last 50 years, versus the Packers’ five. Contemporary history totally favors the Packers, notwithstanding certain moments from Devin Hester and Jay Cutler’s chins, but we’re talking history history, and that has the teams in nearly a dead heat.

There were other worthy candidates for the finals; the Colts, Rams and – yes, J.B. – the Vikings all could claim positions. Teams like the Cowboys, Chiefs and 49ers offered intriguing possibilities and upset potential. If scores of years and hundreds of games weren’t weighing down the results, there might have been more upsets. But statistical probability grinds a straight path through this canyon, and at the end of the path you find Bears-Packers. There will be no more explanations.

Instead, a pregame tale of the tape. The Bears have managed to turn an impressive historical assortment of offensive talent into a subpar historical offense. If you index their offensive rankings on a year-by-year basis the Bears have a historical offensive ranking of 89, against a baseline of 100. Conversely, the Packers have an indexed offensive ranking of 111 – exactly as much above the norm as the Bears are below the norm.

Defensively it’s a different story. The Bears are far above the norm, as you’d expect – their indexed rating is 118 – but the Packers are at 113. On pretend paper, this is a game pitting a below-average-offensive/very-good-defensive team against a very-good-offensive/very-good-defensive team.

In that regard the pretend game is not much different from this week’s semi-pretend national-championship college-football game. It took about 10 minutes of watching LSU and Alabama this season to recognize that ‘Bama has a pretty good offense and a stellar defense, and LSU has a dysfunctional offense and an exceptional defense. Was there ever really any doubt that anything would happen in the Faux National Championship other than exactly what happened? I realize the endless weeks of buildup boosted the GNP by keeping 197 quasi-expert commentators employed through the holidays, but really. Step back, view things dispassionately, call it like you see it, and move on.

Leaving the world of real pretend national championships to return to the more comfortable yet lower-paying world of pretend pretend world championships, the crucial question is the eternal crucial question: How much weight do you give prewar performances, and how do you adequately weight the accomplishments of prewar players?

From 1921-41 the Packers were 163-65-18; the Bears were 177-62-30. The Packers are down 14 in the win column, but only down three in the loss column. That suggests some schedule-padding on the Bears’ part, not to mention a whole bunch of quasi-exhibitions ending in either scoreless ties or blowouts.

Yes, blowouts. The all-time Bears have scored 24,234 points. The all-time Packers have scored 24,975 points. However, if you want to start NFL time at 1946, the Bears have scored 18,973 points to the Packers’ 20,245. The Bears ran up the scores through the ‘20s, picking on the likes of the Akron Indians and the Louisville Colonels. The Packers had their games with the Racine Tornadoes of the football world but did proportionally less barnstorming than the Bears, holding down their numbers and creating an historical statistical dead heat that’s actually anything but.

Speaking to that point, the Bears have 16 HOFers who began their careers pre-war. The Packers have eight. The players can’t be thrown out because their accomplishments are legitimate, and they obviously outperformed their peers. But their contributions need to be discounted about 20 percent in this milieu to account for schedule-padding and generally inferior competition.

One note on that 20 percent discount: Almost every great lineman of the 1930s except for the centers Mel Hein and Alex Wojciehowicz played for the Bears, because when the NFL draft was instituted the Bears drafted linemen when almost every other team drafted skill-position players. The fact that the Bears had all the good linemen and were not flat-out dominant throughout the era suggests three things: the skill-position players were overrated, the offense was antiquated, and the great linemen may not have been all that great. You could discount these players – Fortmann, Stydahar, Kiesling, Musso, Turner -- 30 percent and not be overdoing it.

Outside of the dead-ball era, the difference between the two teams is one-seventh of a game per year – a dead heat record-wise, like we said, though inside that dead heat the Packers scored more points, won more championships, and played defense about as well, and the only reasonably good Bear quarterback, Sid Luckman, padded his stats during the war years. So you could read the tea leaves and say there’s a case for the Packers.

There’s also a case for the Bears. There’s the 1940 NFL Championship, the 1983 Bears, arguably one of best teams ever, and Walter Payton, Gale Sayers, and Dick Butkus – players who shifted the game’s tectonic plates.

We could find a dozen more reasons why this game is basically dead even, so we might as well play it out, knowing that there will eventually be a winner.

(This is not an empty declaration. Two years ago the championship game of the Australian Football League, that delightful mélange of volleyball, rugby, and fragmentation bomb, ended in a tie, so the next weekend they played another one. Imagine if you tried that with the Super Bowl. Al Michaels would blow a motherboard.)

The Packers kick off on a blustery 12-degree day at Soldier Field. Sayers runs the ball out to the 40, and the Bears immediately take advantage of the field position by running three plays for seven yards and punting.

The Packers get the ball, get a first down and nothing more, and kick back to the Bears. The Bears run five and kick back to the Packers, who go three-and-out and kick back to the Bears. The Bears gain ground steadily on these exchanges, moving their starting field position from their own 40 to the Green Bay 44.

The Bears pound the ball close to field-goal range, only to come away empty-handed when Reggie White strips the ball from Sid Luckman and Willie Davis returns the fumble to the Bears 34. At that point Starr goes to work methodically, using Forrest Gregg’s ability to neutralize Doug Atkins on the pass rush to connect on a series of short passes to Hornung, Canadeo, and Sterling Sharpe. That softens the middle for Jim Taylor, who hammers it into the end zone from seven yards out, putting the Packers on top 7-0.

The Bears get another great kickoff return – out to the Packer 48 – but do nothing with it, in the process pointing up the Bears’ major flaw, something that had appeared in previous games but had always been subsumed by strong line play and good defense. Sid Luckman is an overrated quarterback – he’s one of two prewar QBs to start for an all-time team, and he ain’t no Sammy Baugh -- but beyond him the Bears have no quarterback, so he has to play. If he’s able to hand the ball off to Payton and Sayers most of the game and only throw the ball as a change of pace, he’s fine. But shut down the run and force the pass and Luckman has neither the skills nor the skill players to play effectively.

And that’s what happens here. White, Davis and Jordan (with help from Ray Nitschke) control the running game. Adderley, Woodson and Wood cover the receivers. On defense, the Bears aren’t quite strong enough in the D-line to put consistent pressure on the Packers’ quarterbacks (Brett Favre gets a couple of series after Bart Starr gets knocked woozy in the second quarter), and don’t have the D-backs to run with the receivers.

The result deteriorates like the grass at midfield. Pressed into a passing situation, Luckman throws a flare meant for Bill Hewitt right into the arms of Charles Woodson, who undercuts the route, breaks beautifully on the ball, and returns the pick to the Bears 35. The drive produces a Chester Marcol field goal – matched after a long return on the ensuing kickoff leads to a short drive for a three-pointer.

With the lid off the goal and the Bear mystique shattered, the Packers move right back down the field. This time it’s Favre, hooking up with Sharpe on a 24-yard catch-and-run and Hutson on a 45-yard post-corner route that puts the Packers up by two touchdowns.

The Bears are not equipped to play from behind. The Packers’ front line attacks the run with abandon and let their defensive backs handle their business – which they do without difficulty. Offensively, the Packers dial back the aggressiveness as gameday turns dark and blustery; they tack on a third-quarter field goal and withstand a very late Bears touchdown to prevail 20-10.

The stat sheet doesn’t have much to say. Taylor runs for 61 yards and a score. Hornung and McNally each catch four passes out of the backfield. Lofton has a couple of catches, Hutson catches five with a score, and Sharpe snags four.

Defensively, White has 2.5 sacks, Davis has 1.5, and designated pass rusher Ted Hendricks gets home once. In addition to Woodson’s pick, Bobby Dillon and Leroy Butler intercept Luckman, whose day is generally luckless.

Speaking of the Bears’ offense, their vaunted running attack doesn’t amount to much. Even with Bronko Nagurski leading the way, Payton can only manage 71 yards on 19 carries. Sayers is even less productive, with 59 yards rushing, though he does catch six passes for 81 yards. In fact, the passing yards are almost exclusively allocated from the tight end down; Harlon Hill’s two catches and Bill Hewitt’s three are hardly the stuff championships are made of.

So there you go. It pains me greatly to anoint the Green Bay Packers as the champions of the first-and-only Football With 1 Stick Gum all-time playdowns. Why does it annoy me? For those outside of the Packers’ sphere, it seems like hopeless homerism. For those inside the sphere, it’s the only possible outcome. And personally, I have a tremendous antipathy towards the Packers. When the Packers win it buoys the spirits of those around me, and has that pleasant residual effects. But at the same time, it's so cliched. It's like yet another riff on the "Hoosiers" theme starring Dennis Quaid, where the plucky band of underdogs hit the winning shot as time expires. I'm quite anti-cliche, thank you; I love underdogs like Matthew Stafford loves corn dogs, but I prefer the ones with the funky uniforms that get eliminated in round 2. The Packers, the Titletown ouevre, the innumerable houses and mailboxes and lawn tractors and pickup trucks and silos and tea cozies dolled up in green and gold, it gets old after a while. Especially when there's a team like the Saskatchewan Roughriders out there needing some love.

In the end, the weight of talent over time couldn't be denied. The Packers got a few breaks but generally had the most balanced team from line-to-backs on both sides of the ball. They had enough prewar players to create a deep roster and enough great postwar players to provide the necessary punch. There could have been many other outcomes, but this is the one that got home this time.

Fortunately for pretend matchups like this, there’s always a tomorrow. And it starts today. But only after I savor this one for a couple of minutes.