Shootout At The Fantasy Factory

I'll level with you: There is an ulterior motive to this, beyond the undeniable thrill of laying unadulterated smart-aleck comments on a fawning public. It's fantasy football.

The underlying premise of much of Football with 1 Stick Gum is that professional football teams have tendencies, and these tendencies cannot change overnight. Even in the age of free agency teams cannot simply be swapped out, the way you'd pop out Madden 9 and pop in Madden 10. Teams cannot transform; they can only evolve.

Furthermore, there are only so many plays that can be run in a game, and only so many yards that can be gained in a season. Yards gained in the NFL have increased season over season, but slowly. There has never been one season where everything simply exploded beyond the simple addition of games and teams, not even the post-AAFC and post-AFL merger years. It's not really possible. The laws of time and effort take over, and everything, as always, regresses to the mean.

As an aside, this tendency is even more pronounced the further down the football chain you travel. In the early ‘80s the University of Wisconsin hired Don Morton as its head coach. Morton made his reputation at the University of Tulsa as the progenitor of the veer offense, a sort of half-assed wishbone with a couple of pass plays. Morton came to Madison and tried to install the veer using the athletes who were running the Badgers’ patented crummy pro-style offense. It was enough to make the body-passers, the pot-smokers and the other miscellaneous faithful moon for the days of Mike “The Polish Rifle” Kalasmiki.

At that time I was moonlighting as a color commentator for the radio broadcasts of Wisconsin high-school football powerhouse D.C. Everest. They ran the veer too, and ran bubble screens and run-‘n’-shoot passes and plays that would never have showed up on Don Morton’s board if he had stayed at Madison a millennium.

The difference? The veer was D.C. Everest’s system, not the coach’s system. In Madison, the veer was Don Morton’s system, not Wisconsin’s system. The Badger players were the wrong ones to run the plays, and the plays were the wrong plays to boot. Wisconsin not only couldn’t flip a switch over to a new system, but the new system was a total botch. (Something to think about, Fighting Irish fans.)

What does this have to do with fantasy football? Basically, it means that everything the so-called experts think is special really isn't as special as they'd have you believe. If you read the magazines – and I've read a scad-load – you'd think that every player in the league is going to do 10 percent better than he did last year. And then there are the rookies – my Gawd, the rookies!

Well, it's bunk. It's not statistically possible. There are only so many plays in a game and yards in a season, there are only so many opportunities, and no single player or coach is capable of producing sea change overnight. Sam Bradford? Puh-leeze. No one to throw to, no line to protect him, and the game is going to look faster to him than Michael Phelps in a cheat suit. Mike Martz in Chicago? Martz has Johnny Knox, who does not equal Isaac Bruce, a couple of possession receivers who together don't add up to Ricky Proehl, a decent tight end that in the Martz scheme of things is as useful as a backup long snapper, and Jay Cutler, who resembles Kurt Warner the same way that Brett Favre resembles Bart Starr. There is no Torry Holt and no Marshall Faulk, and Soldier Field in December does not offer the same cushy consistency of the TWA Dome.

The way this game works is that players are slotted into roles, and it's those roles, not the players in them, that matter. The No. 1 receiver lines up here and does this, and ultimately it matters little whether it's Greg Jennings or Donald Driver.

The fantasy disconnect is that when you draft Greg Jennings you're not really drafting Greg Jennings. You're drafting the Packers' No. 1 receiver. And while roles don't change much over the course of the season, the players in those roles can, either through injury or performance. The Jets' No. 1 running back will be good for a ton of fantasy points this year, but at what point does that position gravitate from Ladanian Tomlinson to Shonn Greene?

All right, so here’s the first rule of drafting fantasy football players: Draft roles, not players. If the St. Louis Rams are going to be primarily a running team in 2010 – which they will – and you draft Steven Jackson, it’s not a bad idea to draft his backup as well. If you draft Tomlinson, save room to grab Greene. If things are really in a state of flux – read Buffalo – either save room for three RBs from one team or move on to a more settled situation. Besides, if you’re a fantasy-footballer who feels his team will not be complete without a Buffalo running back you’re beyond this column’s ability to help.

Second, realize that every gain has to be matched with a loss somewhere. Okay, so Jay Cutler throws for 10 percent more yards in 2010. He throws on more downs, which means fewer rushing opportunities for Matt Forte and Garrett Wolfe, and fewer rushing yards, more than likely. Since the Bears defense is projected to be worse than last year, the Bears will probably not gain any offensive opportunities. Therefore, it is extremely unlikely that Jay Cutler will pass for 10 percent more yards and Bears running backs will rush for 10 percent more yards.

Here’s another way of approaching the same question. Was Adrian Peterson a worse running back after Brett Favre’s arrival than he was before? Of course not, that fumbling thing aside. However, there were fewer situations in which handing the ball to Adrian Peterson was the No. 1 option. And what of all those pundits who figured that Brett Favre’s arrival would make Peterson even better, because it would keep the defenses honest? They forgot three immutable facts: 1) there are only so many plays to go around, 2) keeping the defenses honest also means keeping the offenses honest, and 3) Brett Favre is an incorrigible ball-hog.

Saying that Favre and Peterson could both bump their numbers proportionally by playing together would be like saying that Dwayne Wade, Chris Bosh and LeBron James will all increase their scoring averages now that they’re Heats, and no one is saying that. Instead, they’re laying bets on whose average will suffer most. Anyone with a milligram of hoops sense knows that there can be only so many trips down the court in a basketball game, and there’s only one ball. Football thinkers would be wise to pay attention.

This is the long way ‘round to the key question: Which roles will produce the most points in 2010? Here are my calculations, based on a specially weighted average of past years and a projection of trends and performances this year. The league gives six points for each touchdown scored, three for each TD pass, and half a point for each reception.

I can tell you this: I ran these same numbers last year and scored the most points of anyone in my league. This is the way football works. Ignore it at your peril.

1 Green Bay QB
2 San Diego QB
3 New Orleans QB
4 Indianapolis QB
5 New England QB
6 Tennessee RB 1
7 Dallas QB
8 Jacksonville RB 1
9 Minnesota QB
10 Houston QB
11 Minnesota RB 1
12 New York J RB 1
13 Miami RB 1
14 Pittsburgh QB
15 Baltimore RB 1
16 New York G QB
17 Philadelphia QB
18 Baltimore QB
19 Arizona QB
20 Carolina RB 1
21 Washington QB
22 San Francisco QB
23 Atlanta QB
24 Denver QB
25 St. Louis RB 1
26 Cincinnati QB
27 Dallas RB 1
28 Indianapolis WR 1
29 San Francisco RB 1
30 Atlanta RB 1
31 Chicago QB
32 Houston WR 1
33 Seattle QB
34 Philadelphia RB 1
35 Jacksonville QB
36 Green Bay RB 1
37 Arizona WR 1
38 Green Bay WR 1
39 Houston RB 1
40 Washington RB 1
41 Kansas City RB 1
42 Seattle RB 1
43 Chicago RB 1
44 Carolina RB 2
45 Philadelphia WR 1
46 Cleveland RB 1
47 San Diego RB 1
48 New England WR 1
49 New England RB 1
50 Detroit RB 1
51 Miami QB
52 Pittsburgh RB 1
53 Kansas City QB
54 New Orleans RB 1
55 Tennessee QB
56 Arizona RB 1
57 Dallas WR 1
58 Detroit WR 1
59 New Orleans WR 1
60 Minnesota WR 1
61 Oakland RB 1
62 Indianapolis WR 2
63 New York G RB 1
64 San Diego WR 1
65 Pittsburgh WR 1
66 Denver RB 1
67 New York J RB 2
68 New York G WR 1
69 New England WR 2
70 Green Bay WR 2
71 Cincinnati RB 1
72 New Orleans WR 2
73 Buffalo RB 1
74 Atlanta WR 1
75 Indianapolis RB 1
76 Tampa Bay RB 2
77 Houston WR 2
78 Cincinnati WR 1
79 San Diego WR 2
80 Detroit QB
81 Pittsburgh WR 2
82 Minnesota WR 2
83 Washington WR 1
84 Baltimore WR 1
85 Kansas City WR 1
86 Carolina QB
87 New Orleans K
88 Buffalo RB 2
89 Oakland QB
90 Dallas WR 2
91 New York G WR 2
92 New York J QB
93 Tampa Bay RB 1
94 Chicago WR 1
95 Detroit RB 2
96 Miami WR 1
97 Denver WR 1
98 Jacksonville WR 1
99 Miami RB 2
100 San Diego K

Anonymity, Thy Name Is Chuck Walker

One of the criteria for judging the worth of a football player prior to about 1977 was how many times they appeared on football cards. Football sets in the pre-merger days routinely checked in below 200 cards, and they didn't double in size right away after the merger. You had to be of a certain quality -- Joe Auer and above, or Max Choboian and below -- to make it onto a football card, and then you had to be of a certain slightly higher quality -- Clendon Thomas country or thereabouts -- to stay on football cards more than one year, unless you were on an expansion team or Topps had a really good collection of photos of you it had to use up, which appears to be the only explanation for Bo Roberson.

This criterion was not infallible, though. Warren Raab appeared on a football card. Marion Rushing appeared on a football card. Steve Thurlow appeared on a football card. Steve Tensi, Gerhard Schwedes, A.D. Whitfield, Hal Bledsole, James Stiger, Pete Perrault, Wahoo McDaniel, Bob Cappadonna, and Tom Nomina all appeared on football cards, and not just in the team photos. Don Trull appeared on so many football cards you forgot he was a backup quarterback for a sub-.500 AFL team (though he will someday be one of the top quarterbacks in the league). Even Cosmo Iacavazzi appeared on a football card, and he never played a game in either league.

But Chuck Walker, two-time All-Pro, 13-year vet, appeared on only one football card, in 1970. To a football-loving kid of the era, Chuck Walker was on the same football footing as Iacavazzi and Raab and Nomina and -- yeesh! -- Perry Lee Dunn. As a practical matter this was very nearly true, since he was a defensive lineman for the Cardinals and therefore almost nonexistent.

But the funny thing was, Walker wasn't bad. Better than multiple-card-appearer Sam Silas certainly, which makes you wonder: Did Topps and Philly have better Sam Silas photos, and if so, why? Silas looked like Werner Ohland channeling Porky Pig. Walker merely had a flat-top with a bald spot, no different than Ken Rice or Sonny Bishop or John Olszewski or 30 other multi-card guys. It's strange that one of the major measuring sticks for player goodness can be so arbitrary. But then again, measuring sticks usually are.

The Numbers Are A Beast

I know I promised I wouldn't drag numbers into this, but I just couldn't help myself.

Just assuming for a second that all numbers are not whacked when it comes to evaluating the relative merits of O-linemen, let’s let the actuaries and allied number-crunchers make their case.

It just so happens I have actuaries who are my friends. It happens when you work in insurance. It especially happens when you work in insurance and marry an actuary.

Anyway, one of the endearing things about actuaries is that they’re so amazed to find someone talking to them that they will do practically anything you ask them to, as long as it involves numbers and not talking to members of the opposite sex.

(I make an exception to this in the case of my wife, who will most emphatically not do anything I ask her to. In her case, matrimony overrules actuarialism.)

So I was thinking about offensive linemen in the Hall of Fame, and wondering why Gene Hickerson was in and others were out. It’s not that I have anything against Gene Hickerson; not at all. He was one of my heroes growing up. Basically any football player who struck the elbows-out O-lineman pose was my hero, and looking back I have no bloody idea why.

Anyway, the Hickerson thought led me to wonder why Frank Gatski was in when others were out, which led me to wonder why Mike McCormack was in when others were out. The common denominator was that they were Cleveland Browns linemen, and lo and behold, the Football HOF is just down the road a piece from Cleveland. Could there be a geographic bias in the selection of linemen for the Hall of Fame?

At this point I called up my actuary buddy and asked him to take a swag at the question. He boogied over to pro-football-reference.com and grabbed the average career value of HOF linemen and ranked the linemen on that basis.

What he got was this:

Anthony Munoz 137
Bruce Matthews 121
Ron Yary 119
Jim Ringo 113
Gene Upshaw 111
John Hannah 106
Forrest Gregg 104
Rosey Brown 103
Randall McDaniel 103
Art Shell 103
Mike Webster 103
Jim Parker 102
Gary Zimmerman 102
Jim Otto 100
Lou Groza 100
Larry Little 99
Jackie Slater 93
Gene Hickerson 92
Bob Brown 91
Tom Mack 91
Lou Creekmur 90
Stan Jones 88
Joe DeLamielleure 86
Rayfield Wright 86
Dan Dierdorf 86
Mike Munchak 84
Jim Langer 82
Bob St. Clair 80
Mike McCormack 80
Ron Mix 77
George Connor 73
Frank Gatski 72
Dwight Stephenson 71
Russ Grimm 63
Billy Shaw 50


Okay, so Hickerson ranked higher than I thought, but otherwise I could justify pretty much everything I saw.

Then I realized that average value isn’t an average at all. It weights its numbers based on longevity, and longevity along does not get you into the HOF.

So when you factor for longevity the rankings go like this:

Anthony Munoz 11.42
George Connor 10.43
Jim Parker 10.20
Dwight Stephenson 10.14
Bob Brown 10.11
Lou Creekmur 10.00
Gary Zimmerman 9.27
John Hannah 8.83
Rosey Brown 8.58
Ron Yary 8.50
Jim Ringo 8.07
Bob St. Clair 8.00
Gene Upshaw 7.93
Randall McDaniel 7.92
Mike Munchak 7.64
Larry Little 7.62
Tom Mack 7.58
Jim Langer 7.45
Art Shell 7.36
Stan Jones 7.33
Mike McCormack 7.27
Joe DeLamielleure 7.17
Rayfield Wright 7.17
Dan Dierdorf 7.17
Jim Otto 7.14
Ron Mix 7.00
Forrest Gregg 6.93
Bruce Matthews 6.72
Frank Gatski 6.55
Mike Webster 6.44
Russ Grimm 6.30
Billy Shaw 6.25
Gene Hickerson 6.13
Jackie Slater 4.89
Lou Groza 4.76

Better. Hickerson drops but Stephenson rises, which is okay, seeing as he was the Practically Perfect Center for most of his career. Gregg and Matthews might be low, or their reputations may be so strong that they overshadow their real accomplishments.

Okay, now I did the same for a lot of HOF suspects. Just looking at their career AVs gives you this:

Mick Tinglehoff 102
Mike Kenn 100
Russ Washington 99
Dick Schafrath 98
Lomas Brown 96
Jim Tyrer 96
Larry Allen 91
Chris Hinton 83
Jerry Kramer 83
Ken Gray 82
Leon Gray 81
Marvin Powell 80
Bob DeMarco 78
Duane Putnam 78
John Niland 78
Ed Budde 77
Ruben Brown 71
Ernie McMillan 70
Dennis Harrah 66
Dick Stanfel 65
Rich Saul 56

Mick Tinglehoff as an HOFer? It’s a satisfying thought. It feels right. On the other hand, look who else is up there: a bunch of offensive-line lifers and Dick Schafrath (whose raw score is way better than Gene Hickerson’s).

Ah, but these numbers overvalue longevity. Correcting for that brings this:

Dick Stanfel 9.285714
John Niland 7.8
Jerry Kramer 7.545455
Dick Schafrath 7.538462
Leon Gray 7.363636
Marvin Powell 7.272727
Duane Putnam 7.090909
Jim Tyrer 6.857143
Russ Washington 6.6
Larry Allen 6.5
Chris Hinton 6.384615
Ken Gray 6.307692
Mick Tinglehoff 6
Bob DeMarco 6
Mike Kenn 5.882353
Ed Budde 5.5
Ruben Brown 5.461538
Lomas Brown 5.333333
Dennis Harrah 5.076923
Ernie McMillan 4.666667
Rich Saul 4.666667

This may be going too far in the other direction, but it makes more sense. Stanfel was a heck of a lineman for bad teams, and Schafrath was great no matter how you slice it. And it throws the long-lived slugs to the bottom, which is where they belong in this exercise.

So what I wound up finding was not necessarily that there’s regional bias in the selection of HOF OLs (though three of the bottom seven linemen are Browns, and then there’s Leroy Kelly over in the RBs) but that longevity is overvalued. Playing 16 pretty good years is more valuable than playing 10 great ones. And that’s just not the way it is.

Aeneas Williams And Three Guys Named "HOF."

Hard to believe considering the relative quality of everything else in ChiStlAz, but Aeneas Williams is the only one of the Cards' all-time starting D-backfield to not be in the HOF. Larry Wilson is, Roger Werhli is, and Dick "Night Train" Lane is.

That sort of quality is like finding Alcantara leather in a Geo Metro, but when you're the Cardinals you take these things where you can find them.

Taking it for granted that Williams will make it into the Hall of Fame -- and while nothing is ever for certain, keeping an eight-time All-Something like Williams out of Canton would be like barring George Bush from the Former Presidents Club just because he spent eight years thinking he was still president of the Texas Rangers -- only one other team will have the distinction of an all-time all-HOF D-backfield, and it's not obvious either.

That team is .... wait for it ... the Detroit Lions, who invented the modern defensive backfield and got three Hall of Famers out of it (including Lane), with Lem Barney coming along later. Williams, the pending Hall of Famer, may be the best of the Cards' bunch, though it's always hard to vote against the inventors of the horsecollar and the safety blitz.

Brown Power

Before we get into the nuts of Jim Brown, a story. A friend who lives in Green Bay met Dick Schaap in a bar and asked him about Jim Brown as a lacrosse player. Brown played lacrosse at Syracuse and crossed paths (and sticks) with Schaap, who played goalie at Cornell. At the time Brown was Brown-shaped and completely healthy, which meant he had muscles on the outside of his shorts, and Schaap was at his adult height of five-foot-eleven, of which an honest eight inches was hair.

Schaap intercepted some of Brown's shots but wasn't religious about it. As he told my friend, "Brown wasn't much of a lacrosse player, but he didn't have to be. No one wanted to get in his way."

That might be the essence of Jim Brown the athlete right there. People got in his way but no one wanted to. Not even Sam Huff at the height of his manic-insurance-salesman powers said, "Man, I can't wait to get me a piece of that Jim Brown."

But the thing of it was, when Jim Brown was on the field everyone knew he was going to get the football, because the Browns offensively had two options: hand the ball to Brown or punt. The QB of Brown's Browns was either math whiz Frank Ryan or Milt Plum, the magician behind the Lions’ dynamic punting game of the mid-‘60s. Gary Collins, who ran like a fully loaded game-show host, was the split end. At the other end was Johnny Brewer and the mattress attached to his back. Rich Kreitling was in the mix too, to the amusement of D-backs throughout the league.

Given a choice between Jim Brown and that in the NFL of the late '50s, what did Browns GM Brown tell Coach Brown to have RB Brown do? Exactly.

The numbers tell the story. Jim Brown represented 32 percent of the Browns’ offense for his career, just rushing the ball. Add in his catches and that number jumps to 38 percent.

No running back in the postwar era comes close to those numbers for a career. O.J. Simpson was half the Bills’ offense in his 2,000-yard season, but he couldn’t sustain it. Neither could Earl Campbell or Gale Sayers. In Barry Sanders’ best year his rushing yards were 35 percent of the offense -- less if you factor in Scott Mitchell’s givebacks.

Here’s another way of looking at it. Here are the differentials between Brown and the second-place rushers for the eight seasons Brown won a rushing title.

Year      Brown's Yards      Runner-Up Yards     Differential     % Differential
1957      942                       700                          242               25.69%
1958      1,527                    791                          736               48.20%
1959      1,329                    1,036                       293               22.05%
1960      1,257                    1,101                       156               12.41%
1961      1,408                    1,307                       101                 7.17%
1963      1,863                    1,018                       845               45.36%
1964      1,446                    1,169                       277               19.16%
1965      1,544                    867                          677               43.85%

Two times in his career Brown had almost twice as many rushing yards as the league’s second-best rusher. Only once was the gap single digits.

By comparison, in Barry Sanders’ huge 1997 season he won the rushing title by 295 yards over Terrell Davis – roughly a 14-percentage-point cushion. Brown beat that gap six times out of eight.

The one-dimensional Neanderthalism of the Browns’ early ‘60s offense hadn't been seen in the NFL since Ernie Nevers took his Duluth Eskimos on a three-month romp through the playgrounds and garden spots of central Ohio, and Jim Brown took it with him when he left. In the post-Brown era every great RB required a posse, even if it was Willie Gault and Matt Suhey. The DIY ethos was gone forever.

You start with a whole lot of running backs, and what you’re left with in the end is Jim Brown. Jim Brown was his own video game before video games were invented. Jim Brown had Jim Brown and some blockers taking on platoons of HOFers, all with steel plates in their heads, and Jim Brown dominated. He was as black and proud as the truth.

He's Got Size And Speed, And He Stinks

Much is made in modern football of the miraculous case of the short D-back. For these players, the convention seems to be that the shorter they are the faster they run, and the faster they run the better they cover. That would put the double whammy on Fischer, who was small without being fast.

But just wait a minute, Pat; don't go nowhere. Speed is not inversely related to size. If it was, Usain Bolt would be the size of a gluon. And if speed is truly all that matters for a D-back, why not simply stick Usain Bolt back there and let wang chung? But Usain Bolt is not a D-back and no one is talking of making Usain Bolt a D-back, much less letting wang chung.

What's going on?

What's going on is a lie. It's like the old saw about how it's not the size of the dog in the fight but the size of fight in the dog. It's not about size but quickness, and not about quickness but about a specific type of quickness: the ability to change directions quickly.

You hear a lot of talk at the scouting combines about how a D-back prospect is either fluid in the hips or not fluid in the hips. This is not a hip thing the way some puppies get a hip thing and have to be put down. This is a hip thing that means a good D-back has to quickly throw his hips to change direction to keep up with a quick-cutting wide receiver.

Yeah, not running like Sherman Plunkett is a good thing, but assuming a D-back can cover ground faster than a garden slug, or the aforementioned Mr. Plunkett, it's far, far better to be able to stop in a heartbeat and whip the hips and catch up to a flanker coming out of a cut than it is to have another tenth in the 40.

Pat Fischer could change direction faster than Eric Mangini trying to describe his latest loss, plus he had the engaging aggressiveness of a Looney Tunes weasel contemplating Foghorn Leghorn's drumstick. He was not fast, was never fast, but was quick enough to start at corner until he was 37. It's possible. But it really has nothing to do with size.

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.

Swann Song

I spent a summer as the assistant GM of the U.S. National Semi-Pro Football Team, accompanied the team on its British tour, and heard a ton (metric) of Eric Swann stories on the road to the first-ever World Bowl and over pints in the pubs of the appropriately named British resort town of Blackpool.

Swann was the only semipro player in the modern era to be drafted No. 1 by any team, and by the modern era we mean the days when a scouting trip to watch players did not require knowing the password to a speakeasy.

The members of the U.S. National Semi-Pro Football Team, those who realized that passport photos cannot be taken in the backyard, in front of a tree, with a favorite dog, said that Swann wasn't the best player they ever played against and therefore shouldn't have gone No. 1 to the Cards, but they're wrong. Jackie Robinson wasn't the best baseball player of color; he was the appropriate player.

While Eric Swann was no Jackie Robinson, he was young and properly proportioned and had a clean criminal record, which put him at least one leg up on 90 percent of his semipro competition. Furthermore, he was going to the Cardinals, so it's not like the leap was huge.

If Swann never lived up to the Paul Bunyanesque expectations it's not his fault, or the fault of semi-pro football. Not every trailblazer blazes a trail clean through.

Why I Hate Charlie Trippi

Okay, I don't hate Charlie Trippi. But I don't think he's a Pro Football HOFer based solely on his on-field performance.

Trippi's closest comp among modern quarterbacks is … well, it's Ronnie Brown, actually. Runs more than passes, blockers out front. It's not very complicated or scenic, but it got Trippi a couple of All-Pro nods and a place in the Hall of Fame.

It's mind-blowing that a runner who never won a rushing crown or a passer with a 5-11 record at quarterback and whose best showing on the all-time charts is 182nd place in punting average could be a Hall of Famer, but Trippi was the best player on the Cards' only championship team, and that's ... that's enough. Those Kurt Warner doubters may want to reconsider.

Ah, but let's not leave the remains of Charlie Trippi quite so soon. This you need to know about Trippi: He filled the stands. Like Doak Walker, Trippi was a college player who came out of school dripping excitement. The postwar National Football League needed Charlie Trippi just like it needed Red Grange in the early days. There was no TV contract; what the players, teams, and league got was based almost exclusively on the number of people who came out to watch the game. And if, like Grange, Trippi was less of a player on the field than he was in the newspapers, it's somewhat secondary. He helped salvage the game by bringing out the crowds, and that, along with being the best player on the Cards' only championship team, is more than enough.

Bulldog Turner, Dick Lebeau, And Hunk Anderson, In A Heap

Dick LeBeau is going into the Hall of Fame, and good for him. He was a superb defensive back and has been unsurpassed as a defensive coach, though it's a fair bet that from this point forward HOF voters will still equate putting assistant coaches into the Hall of Fame with eating wood ticks.

However, LeBeau's ascendance into Valhalla has a dark side in that his coattails will be as short as Supergnat Smith, and Hunk Anderson isn't going to be invited for the ride.

Rotten, because what LeBeau has been to defenses and D-backs Anderson was to lines, the Bears line in particular. He also -- Mr. LeBeau please note -- helped invent the blitz.

More Bears linemen are in the Hall of Fame in part because Anderson was their coach. Does that mean Bulldog Turner wouldn't have been a Hall of Famer if his coach had been, say, Aldo Donelli? Well, not in this case. Turner was an athletic, durable lineman, as smart as anyone who's made a career out of geting kicked in the head, and one of those marvelous center-linebackers of the late '30s and '40s. But Hunk Anderson helped make him, and George Musso and Joe Stydahar and George Trafton and Danny Fortmann and George Connor, and that shouldn't be forgotten.

The Last Word On Don Coryell

Don Coryell was a Sid Gillman-caliber offensive innovator, he won everywhere he went, he could motivate a 30-year veteran of the DMV, and he made bad teams better and the players and coaches on those teams into stars. If that's not the definition of a Hall of Famer, I don't know what is.

The ChiStlAz Cardinals, For Better Or ... Better? What Am I Saying?

If the Cardinals were a car they would be a Fiat. The gear shift would come off in your hand, the steering column would disconnect randomly, the windshield washers would spout brake fluid, the motor would turn over only on French holidays, and you could watch the highway go by through the holes in the floorboards.

In all fairness, the Cardinals have not always been a Fiat. At times they have been a Hillman Minx.

From this you should gather that not only have the Cardinals been abysmal, but that they have been wantonly, willfully abysmal, so much so that you expect to learn that the Cards’ GM for the last 50 years has been Sacha Baron Cohen.

This has not been the case, of course. The Cardinals have for most of their history been controlled by the Bidwill family, which is to inept football management what the Kennedys have been to bed-hopping Irish machine politics only with fewer assassinations, though not for lack of want-to.

The result of this despotism is remarkable: One world championship in 89 seasons, and that clouded by the state of the post-WWII NFL. Seven playoff appearances. A .413 winning percentage. More losses than any other team in NFL history by a margin of 100. Six Hall of Famers who spent the bulk of their careers with the team (coaches not included, and Bill Bidwill definitely not included).

Besides moving and losing, the Cardinals are known for three things: kick returners, defensive backs and offensive linemen. Of these, only offensive linemen are not commonly found on stinkers. In the post-1960s game, the weaker your defensive line the more time your quarterback has to throw, the more pressure put on the defensive backs, and the better the defensive backs appear by sheer dint of workload. The Bears have had no better than mediocre defensive backs since 1960, and they’ve not only been largely successful, they’ve earned a reputation as a defensive powerhouse because no one throws on the defensive backs – not because the defensive backs are so good but because the quarterback has no time, because the defensive line and linebackers are so good.

As for kick returners, if returning kickoffs is a big part of your game you either have Gary Hogeboom as your quarterback, Freddie Joe Nunn as your defensive anchor, or both. The Cardinals have had four or five of the top 50 kick returners in the league since 1960 – Stump Mitchell, Vai Sikahema, Abe Woodson, Terry Metcalf, and Ollie Matson, depending on your yardstick, with Willard Harrell and Eric Metcalf in reserve. A good team has one or two, and then only if they hang around for a decade out of sheer inertia, like Brian Mitchell or Troy Brown.

It is a lie that the Cardinals have never been able to run the ball except when it is kicked. There have been five distinct periods when the Cardinals have been able to run. The first was when they had Ernie Nevers and everyone ran the ball. That lasted three years. The second was when they won a championship and everyone on their team ran the ball. That lasted three years. Then there was the Ollie Matson Era, when King Hill and Sam Etcheverry gave the ball to Matson and watched him run. That lasted five years, until Matson was traded to the Rams for nine football-team parts. (Incidentally, trading one player for nine football-team parts makes sense if the team getting the parts is the Monongahela Pig-Iron Ingots of the Wyoming Valley Industrial League. It makes less sense for an NFL team, or the Cardinals.) This was succeeded by – surprise! – the John David Crow Era, which was numerically more impressive than the previous era – but, oh, King Hill and Sam Etcheverry were still the quarterbacks. And finally, there was the Ottis Anderson Era, which lasted most of six seasons, until Anderson’s yards per carry could be measured in microns. And then they traded him. To the Giants. Where he was MVP of the Super Bowl.

There you go. Twenty years out of 90 when the Cardinals really ran the ball. Heck, we’ll throw in Stump Mitchell’s thousand-yard season and Jim Otis’ good year and the year MacArthur Lane led the league in rushing TDs and call it 23. Twenty-three years out of 90. One-quarter of all seasons yay, and the remaining three-quarters populated by failed scatbacks like Leeland McElroy and mud-slow fullbacks like Earl Farrell.

The D-line and linebackers have been more a story of bad luck. Andre Wadsworth blew out a knee. E.J. Junior got hurt. Eric Swann got hurt. Seth Joyner got old. Dave Butz woke up in Washington. So did Ken Harvey. Darryl Sims never woke up at all. Jamir Miller and Simeon Rice wanted market value. Bad luck, that’s what it is. There are signs this may be changing, but the minute you say that Darnell Dockett chafes at the franchise tag and there you are, snakebit again.

There’s a lesson here, namely: It’s all about the lines, but not always. The Cards’ D-line has been a botch from the get-go. It could not have been worse had it been manned by the Backyadigans. But sometimes one line is all that’s needed to ensure a lifetime’s mediocrity, especially when the word from the Bidwills on high is that Joe Childress and Willis Crenshaw is a perfectly acceptable backfield tandem and that Edgerrin James in his Wile E. Coyote/legs-churning-furiously-in-midair phase is worth $9 million a year. In that case it doesn’t matter if Dan Dierdorf, Conrad Dobler, and Tom Banks are blocking. Anthony Munoz and Jonathan Ogden could pitch in and Tootie Robbins could be the H-back and they’d still average -3 per carry.

There are signs of a turnaround in the desert, but there are always signs in the desert. They’re mirages, or small voices of dissent crushed by a Buddy Ryan hitting town or an Aeneas Williams pulling out. It’s Tienamen Square, with Solomon Wilcotts as the sideline reporter.

No, we simply ought to consign ourselves to the reality that the Cardinals have always been bad and will always be bad. The perpetuation of the species depends on it. And there, at last, is the justification for King Hill.

A Brief, Pointed Observation On Larry Wilson

Wilson is credited with inventing the safety blitz, but this is much less of an accomplishment when viewed from Wilson's practical perspective. If your front four was Don Brumm, Sam Silas, Joe Robb, and Chuck Walker, leaving only you and Dale Meinert to tackle anyone, you'd sure as hell crowd the line of scrimmage, too.

So Is It Nature Or Nurture, Harlon Hill?

So were the Bear quarterbacks so bad because they were throwing to Tom Waddle and Willard Dewveall, or were the Bear wide receivers so bad because Steve Walsh and Jack Concannon were doing the throwing?

The Bears' career-receiving-leaders list is a smorgasbord of mediocrity peppered with Brian Baschnagels and Marty Bookers, but part of that was by design. In the first NFL draft, while the rotten teams were drafting the Jay Berwangers of the world, George Halas drafted eight linemen; subsequently he perfected a devasting rushing offense.

Under Halas and the subsequent Halas-lite leadership, first-round draft choices have been spent on running backs, linemen and linebackers, with only the occasional nod to a wide receiver (c.f., the fast but perpetually disappointing Willie Gault).

Harlon Hill was the pinnacle of Bears wide-receivership from the '30s through the '80s, rivaled only by Johnny Morris for a couple of seasons. He was a genuine home-run threat who still ranks eighth all-time in yards per catch. That and three All-Pro nods won't get you into the Hall of Fame or even buy you a cup of coffee, but by Bears standards it puts you right at the top ... yelling at Sid Luckman to throw you the damn ball.

Is Troy Aikman The Worst HOF QB, Or Just A Pale Imitation Of The Worst HOF QB?

Hall of Famers in any sport (and rock ‘n’ roll as well, though the very idea of a Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame still chaps us worse than bike shorts) can be dumped into one of three buckets: The absolute greats, the quite good, and the momentarily good. Halls of fame should be repositories for only the absolute greats, but if they did that they’d be out of business in a month, because the necessarily meager number of absolute greats and their fans means the halls’ rust-belt towns would go a-begging two years out of three. Canton needs Gene Hickerson fans. Cooperstown needs bonkers Cubs fans to spend like pork-barrel congressmen in support of the opium dream that Andre Dawson is actually worthy of sitting at Hank Aaron’s elbow.

The momentarily good are another issue. Sometimes it’s obvious why they make it – they only got half a career because of segregation, for instance – and other times it’s more obscure than the enduring popularity of cute cat pictures. Joe Tinker, Crab Evers and Frank Chance, for instance. They’re in the Baseball HOF because of a poem. That’s like putting the Old Spice guy in Canton because he looks good on a horse.

More on topic, Red Grange blew out his knee in his first pro season, and his career was less distinguished than that of Gob Buckeye. But Red Grange was pro football’s first great draw. Without him there might have been no Chicago Bears, no pro football, and no Football HOF. Enshrining him was an act of self-preservation akin to enshrining fire in the Hall of Great Inventions.

To a lesser extent this explains Charlie Trippi as much as anything can. Trippi was the postwar Grange and he led the Cardinals to their only championship. Call it a sop to Bill Bidwill or a nod to Trippi’s ability to put butts in seats regardless of his on-field performance, because Trippi is the worst HOF QB ever in the same way that Cy Young is the all-time winningest pitcher. No one will win 700-plus games in the majors again, and no QB will be elected to the HOF with worse numbers than Charlie Trippi. You can quit holding your breath, Stan Gelbaugh.

So the question is, which bucket gets Troy Aikman? Aikman was the Cowboys’ QB when they truly were America’s Team, a lurching juggernaut controlled by J.R. Ewing from the Mini-KISS version of Dallas. He was Tom Brady in cowboy boots without a supermodel mama on his arm, and he led his team to many a big win. Does he qualify on numbers, or did he fly in on some Texas-sized je nais se quoi?

The skinny on Aikman places him squarely in the quite-good bucket. His career comps are guys like Mark Brunell and Donovan McNabb, upper-echelon guys whose careers were nonetheless marred by an inability to win the big game. Troy Aikman, then, is an upper-echelon guy who takes the next step: a McNabb who beats the Patriots, a Brunell who beats the Oilers and gets J-Ville into the big game, a Steve McNair playing in a market that feels about football the same way Osama bin Laden feels about the Koran. Lest you think that A) winning the big game and B) playing in Dallas don't matter, consider Troy Aikman Exhibit A in the case for the prosecution.

It does beg the question, though: Even if he’s not just momentarily good, is Troy Aikman the worst non-Trippi HOF QB ever?

A very simple test is to examine the ever-helpful career comps at pro-football-reference.com. If someone was worse than Aikman they would likely have fewer HOFers in their career comps. So we checked the career comps and lo and behold! Roger Staubach, Bart Starr, and Joe Namath have two HOFers as career comps; Aikman, Y.A. Tittle, and Terry Bradshaw have three.

Okay, so Aikman escapes there. Let's dive deeper into the numbers. We created an index that measures how the postwar HOF QBs (and Peyton Manning, Brett Favre, and Tom Brady) finished on categories that have nothing to do with a 16-game season versus a 12-game slate -- things like completion percentage, yards per attempt, passer rating, career value, All-Something nods, and interception percentage. When we plotted where the QBs fit, here’s what we got (FYI: lower is better):

Manning 8.67
Young 13.44
Montana 18.67
Marino 22.56
Favre 25.00
Brady 25.78
Fouts 42.22
Kelly 43.44
Moon 43.78
Graham 47.50
Elway 49.67
Staubach 52.22
Tarkenton 53.00
Layne 60.38
Jurgensen 62.22
Aikman 67.67
Griese 72.22
Starr 73.44
Van Brocklin76.50
Unitas 77.00
Tittle 77.00
Dawson 77.11
Bradshaw 90.89
Namath 109.33
Blanda 194.78


Maybe we chose the wrong categories if we’re trying to prove Aikman’s lack of worth. Looking at it this way, the QBs separate themselves neatly into five distinct bands: The undisputed greats (Manning, Young, Montana, Marino, Favre, and Brady); the greats (Fouts, Kelly, Moon, Graham, Elway, Staubach, and Tarkenton); the consistently quite good (Layne, Jurgensen, Aikman, Griese, Starr, Van Brocklin, Unitas, and Tittle); the momentarily good (Bradshaw and Namath); and George Blanda, who we can only assume made it in as a kicker.

Aikman fares acceptably, which makes sense. He threw for a decent amount of yards in a game, and to the intended receivers, and put the ball in the end zone with reasonable frequency. He nestles in a little sub-group with the superb game managers Bob Griese and Bart Starr, and that’s about right. Aikman managed things in Dallas as well as anyone could, and that alone justifies his trip back to the rust belt.

Bronko Nagurski, Not Live From Nowhere

The amazing thing looking back at Bronko Nagurski and how he got to be there was how direct it all was. When he came down from the Iron Range all brawn and hard consonants there was no national recruiting war; he went to the University of Minnesota.

When he got out of school after four years of two-way greatness there was no protracted drama over where he would play professional football, no raccoon-coated Mel Kiper bellering at passers-by through a megaphone, "Nagurski to the Stapletons at number three; great value pick at that position."

They would have looked at him like he was completely daft, and they would have been right. They would have taken his pennant away, too.

The Bears were there first with the most money, and so he signed. Then when he got in the backfield they so much as shouted across the line, "We're running Nagurski now; try and stop us," which they couldn't, because there were three Hall of Famers in front of Nagurski, who himself was as big as their biggest lineman and ran like the 20th Century Limited. And when Nagurski retired to wrestle and fish he said, "I'm retiring to wrestle and fish," and it was done without SportsCenter on-location at Rainy River or Rich Eisen babbling live from the Mankato Armory.

People in the '30s had the tech savvy of stuffed animals and were casually bigoted, offandedly cruel, and foolishly superstitious chain smokers and binge drinkers, but they weren't so idiotic as to care where Bronko Nagurski fished, what he caught, and how the fish felt about the whole thing. Advantage them.

Have No Fears (Literally)

Fears is the missing -- okay, not truly missing, but certainly underappreciated -- link between Don Hutson and Lance Alworth. A long strider with hops and less of Elroy Hirsch's jitterbug stuff, Fears won three straight receiving titles running under bombs in the Waterfieldian era, then had his numbers tumble as the Dutchman took over and the offense opened up like the headers on a hemi.

However, Fears was only a one-time All-NFLer, and for that blame must be laid squarely at the feet of East Coast writers pretending the league ended at Chicago.

Consider this: In 1948, Fears' rookie year, Fears caught 57 passes for 698 yards and was named second-team all-NFL by two out of six major publications or syndicates. The other five all-NFL ends, Ken Kavanaugh, Bill Swiacki, Mal Kutner, Pete Pihos, and Ed Cifers, caught 18, 39, 41, 46, and 0 passes -- and none of them played west of the Mississippi. Pihos, Kutner, and Swiacki finished second, third and fourth in receiving; Kutner, Pihos, and Fears were the top three in receiving yards and yards per game; Kutner, Pihos, and Swiacki were 1-2-3 in receiving TDs, and Kutner was second in yards per catch. Kutner, Pihos, and Fears were the NFL's top three ends in 1948; Swiacki was there because he was a Columbia boy and a college legend, Cifer was a D-end, and Kavanaugh was there because he was a Bear and George Halas threatened to beat up any sportswriter who didn't vote for him.

Fears got the short end of the stick in '48, the stick got longer in '49, and he got full measure in '50. After that Fears' numbers dropped, others' rose, and he was done.

Why Bart Starr is Better Than Brett Favre, Ch. 1

Starr: 9-1 record in the playoffs, five NFL championships, two Super Bowl wins, 94-57-6 record as a starter.

Favre: One Super Bowl win, one Super Bowl loss, 2-3 record in NFC championship games, 160-93 record as a starter.

Any questions? Good. On to Chapter 2.

Why Bart Starr is Better Than Brett Favre, Ch. 2

I work for a place that insists everything can and should be measured in numbers. Happy? There’s a number for that. Successful? A number for that. Depressed, choleric, pregnant, bloated, fast, slow, hard-working, lazy, fond of beets? Numbers for all of those.

Kinda like Chapter One above. Everything measured in numbers.

But in this great process to numberize everything, things that can’t be measured in numbers are being measured in numbers. How sweet and bracing the first Diet Mountain Dew of the morning tastes, for instance. It’s part of our ongoing effort as a species to explain everything around us, even Jillian Michaels Yelling At Fat People, in stark contrast to Van Morrison’s First Universal Truth, which is: It ain’t why, it just is. And nothing beats a good saxophone break.

Who’s a better football player falls right in on that list of Sisyphean challenges. You can come up with numbers that show that Ruben Brown is better than Chad Clifton, but you can also come up with numbers that show Clifton is better than Brown, and numbers that show that neither one is as good as, oh, I don't know, Anthony Clement. And unless you run them up against each other in a big mud wallow you won’t know – and once that’s done, all you’ll really know is who’s better in a mud wallow.

So seeing as we can’t pit the real Bart Starr against the real Brett Favre in any meaningful fashion, and we don’t want to play the Misleading Numbers game, let’s talk about the way they go about quarterbacking.

First, let me say that I know Brett Favre personally a little, and I consider him the most competitive man I have ever met. When he signed autographs for my client, he wanted to sign them faster and better than Drew Bledsoe. When he had lines to speak, he wanted to speak them more clearly than Troy Aikman.

Being competitive is an admirable quality in a quarterback. It’s certainly better than not being competitive. Which is why Matt Flynn still has an NFL career and JaMarcus Russell doesn’t.

However, I have never known Brett Favre to be the most competitive person ever when it comes to contests of intelligence. In words, actions, choices, and family situations (he’s a bloody grandfather! I’m 10 years older than Favre and have an eight-year-old!) Favre has never shown any reason why the stereotype of the tractor-driving southern hick should not apply in his case. When he opens his mouth to speak you’re almost surprised to hear words and not .38 Special songs. If he would ever stop agonizing over retirement long enough to take on the kids in Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader, I would pay hard money to watch. The apocryphal story is that Aaron Rodgers in his rookie season had digested more of the playbook than Favre had in year 13 – but they don’t give prizes for memorizing the playbook.

In so many ways Brett Favre ought to be every creative person’s wet dream of a QB – always willing to go off-script, to yield to the wildest flights of imagination, to extemporate, to do things his way – but to this creative person at least Favre’s freelancing comes off as wholly self-serving and doltish.

The reason for that is when Favre’s competitiveness mingles with Favre’s creativity the result is an overpowering belief in his ability to make something spectacular out of any situation. In other words, when life gives you lemons, make lobster Newburg. Or a nuclear-powered sub. Or the Crab Nebula.

As a result, Brett Favre does not so much run an offense as he allows certain plays to be called from the sidelines and run on the field until he decides it’s time for him to play his game, which involves high-risk passes often improvised in the huddle or at the line of scrimmage. It’s the football equivalent of traveling to Africa for the expressed purpose of sleeping around. Yeah, you might be able to get away with it, but there are more prudent things, if you catch the drift.

Watching Favre is like watching Evel Knievel. You know it will end badly, but you’re not exactly sure when – and the greater the fan, the more they secretly hope for the largest mushroom cloud, the most pretzelized pileup, the longest fall off the highest cliff, with the deepest, most satisfying BOOM! at the end.

Contrast this with Bart Starr. It’s not hard. In a world of shadows Favre is starless and Bible-black, and Starr is the color of the moon on a cold night.

Favre will say whatever springs to mind. Granted, it’s not much content-wise, but it’s definitely off-the-cuff. Nobody who was that bad in There’s Something About Mary is a good enough actor to summon tears at will.

Starr always gives the impression of someone who carefully chews his thoughts 32 times before speaking. As a head coach, he enjoyed calling out someone in public as much as BP executives enjoy gulf shrimp packed in oil. His life outside of football has been devoted to his church, his charities, and an enlightened brand of capitalism. He has rarely scrawled an autograph.

That class extends to his family. When his wife, Cherry, shilled furniture, she was absolutely as classy a furniture-shiller as someone in a beehive hairdo and a bullet bra could be.

Fine. So Bart Starr does not encourage 14-year-olds to marry or advocate deer hunting off the back of an International Harvester. That alone doesn’t make him even as good a quarterback as Steve Walsh (who for sheer inability to perform every significant task required of a modern professional QB had no peer). What made Starr great?

First, his ability to completely subsume personal goals for the good of the team. Starr was not a great quarterback as far as physical tools go; he wasn’t a 17th-round draft pick, either, but football teams in the 1950s had absolutely no clue when it came to drafting QBs . You may as well have been asking them to choose BlackBerry or iPhone. (Consider the QBs drafted ahead of Starr in 1956: Earl Morrall, John Roach, Fred Wyant, Em Lindbeck, John Polzer, Tom Spiers, George Herring, and George Welsh. Only Morrall was a legitimate NFL starter. And no, I have no idea what an “Em Lindbeck” is.)

Starr often expressed his disregard for personal accomplishments, and the sport took that to heart. He was first-team All-NFL once and a Pro Bowler four times. Randall Cunningham has done as much.

Starr’s willingness to do whatever was asked of him made the players around him better. That’s not to say Jim Taylor would not have been a HOFer with a different QB. Jim Taylor was enough of a Marine that he would have been a HOFer if John Tesh had been the QB. On the other hand, without Bart Starr Paul Hornung would have been a drunk French soccer player taking a dive after having been breathed on by another player. And as he stands up, grimacing more profoundly than a gutshot Samuel L. Jackson, there’s … Bob Lilly. Sort of takes your breath away, doesn’t it?

Right along with that, Starr was smart enough to know that not doing it his way does not make him any less of a leader. Think about the QB position for a minute. Even the most ornery, bull-headed, independent Texan cuss of a QB is the tool of a head coach. If he doesn’t do enough of what the coach wants he’s more gone than Blind Melon. This is immutable; even Brett Favre is bound to follow the offense to an extent, under threat of a trade to the Saskatchewan Roughriders for the rights to Don Trull (who, experts agree, is a fine backup who will one day be the number-one quarterback, and one of the top-notch passers in the league). However, the test of a QB is whether he can make his teammates in the huddle believe that a 47 Cross Trap on third-and-34 is his idea, and absolutely the play that needs to be run to its utmost in this particular situation.

The trouble starts when the willing suspension of disbelief breaks down, when the QB starts thinking he’s a better coach than the coach, that instead of a 47 Cross Trap what needs to be run is a skinny post, to a slow receiver with poor hands, against an All-Pro corner. Convincing a bunch of football players in a huddle that this is the thing to do is not like winning over the Supreme Court; there’s a lot of gullibility amidst the avoirdupois. Besides, at $3.72 million a season going for broke is relative.

Starr escaped all that by running the offense persuasively and authoritatively. He didn’t do just what Lombardi asked; sometimes he did things that out-Lombardied Lombardi. It would just have been ineptitude in synergy if the coach had been Rich Kotite, but with Starr and Lombardi it was gorgeous. Even so, there was never any question in the huddle of who was in charge and who was going to make this play work. It was going to start with Bart Starr and everyone was going to do their job, and if not, they were going to hear about it from Starr and Lombardi – and some players genuinely feared Starr’s wrath, gentle and Christian as it was, more than Lombardi’s.

In the end Starr proved out a winner, which is different than performing acts that win games. In the 2009 season Brett Favre performed at least three acts that you could definitively say won games for the Vikings – oh, but he also performed an act that definitively lost the NFC Championship and cost his team a trip to the Super Bowl. The 2010 NFC Championship (and for that matter, the 2008 NFC Championship) will be remembered long after the pass that beat the ‘Niners has been forgotten.

In Bart Starr’s career only one dumb play and one truly bad game come to mind: the ball he fumbled away to George Andrie that was returned for a touchdown in the 1967 Ice Bowl, and a 1962 Thanksgiving Day game against the Lions where Starr was sacked what seems like 31 times. The Packers won the Ice Bowl, and the Turkey Day game? The only game the Packers lost all year. And the wins are games that will never die.

Quarterbacking is way more like advertising than either the quarterbacks or the ad guys would like to admit. Brett Favre is the hyperproduced ad that leaves the world breathless but doesn’t sell a crumb more cake. Bart Starr is the simple ad that simply sells and sells and sells.

Selling is winning. Winning is selling. Bart Starr sold, the Packers bought, and together they created a dynasty.

Enter The Lions, Exit Reason

I was in Chicago last weekend after a good long time of not having been in Chicago, and I have to admit I don’t know what all the fuss is about. While there is an eternally long knot of people trying to get into the city there is a knot equally as large of people trying to get out, which makes you wonder, “If it’s so good, why are people fleeing at 11 in the morning?” This is in spite of the CTA trains which seem to be running 80 percent empty down the middle of every highway from Rockford east.

Chicago, then, fills up every day with people who have not yet recognized the futility of driving into any large city, and who once they arrive and have a good look around, climb into their Chevy Cavaliers and rush right back out again.

This is because whoever hung on Chicago the tag “Second City” knew of whence they spoke. Everything about Chicago is inferior to New York at least and often places as pedestrian as Cincinnati – and don’t even get me started on Toronto and Vancouver.

Chicago has a lake, and it’s pretty, but L.A., Miami, and New York have the ocean. I love the Great Lakes but the ocean is better, except up around the Porcupine Mountains, which is about as far as the Great Lakes can get from Chicago. The skyline is nondescript, even with the building that used to be called the Sears Tower but which now has been infested by British insurance types and is called the Willis Tower. To take the elevator to the top of the Sears Tower you pass a mural of Chicago’s most prominent historical figures: Abraham Lincoln, John Belushi, and Oprah. Once you get to the top and look about you say, “Huh. What a lot of building blocks posing as buildings.” I asked my niece about the one building I saw with architectural merit. “That’s a jail,” she said. Of course it was.

Chicago is lined with decrepit buildings on the way to Wrigley Field, which is also decrepit, and then there are more decrepit buildings until you get to the nicer suburbs, which are 10 miles south of Green Bay. Going south takes you past U.S. Cellular Field, which is nicer than Shea Stadium because Shea has been torn down, and then more decrepit buildings and more decrepit buildings and then you wake up in Indianapolis.

Chicago is a great place to eat hot dogs and pizza, therefore you see few skinny Chicagoans. The most entertaining sight in Wrigley Field is not the Cubs, who play a brand of baseball that rivals hoeing cotton for entertainment, but watching Cubs fans trying to squeeze into box seats.

In sum, then, Chicago is a great city minus the exhilaration, which is the sole defining characteristic of a great city. It’s merely a large vessel for holding people and spilling them out again.

I mention Chicago when writing about the Detroit Lions because the city and the Lions have so much in common. They have both seemingly always been around without ever having really been the one. No one has ever said, “Man, Chicago is really top of the heap,” unless they are a cow. Similarly, there have been few times in NFL history when the one thing a team had to do to prove it was really top-shelf was to beat the Lions. Only once in team history – and the history goes back to 1930 – have the Lions had the sole best record in the league. Even in the mid-‘50s, when the team was at its peak, there were other teams with records as good or better. The fact that the Lions won three championships in those years speaks to the Kwikrete character of guys like Bobby Layne and Joe Schmidt while obscuring the fact that the Lions were one of three or four teams that could have won.

Those were curious teams, the Lions of the ‘50s, in large part because they were built around a strong offensive line and a defensive backfield. The Lions were good up front offensively and from the linebackers back defensively, and few other teams have been built that way to start with, much less able to sustain that construction more than a season or two. The only other team that comes close is the Don Coryell Cardinals, and once Larry Stallings fell off they were done.

The interesting thing about the Cardinals and Lions as bedfellows is what strange bedfellows they make. The Cardinals threw the ball (mostly) and had the reputation of being porous defensively. The Lions ran the ball (mostly) and had the reputation of being impregnable. The offense part is the difference between Don Coryell and Buddy Parker. The defense part is the difference between Mark Arneson and Joe Schmidt.

The problems with sustaining this construction is that it’s physically and intellectually off-kilter, like bicycling on a tightrope with all the weight on one end of the pole. It’s easy for a GM to get caught up in a Bugs Bunny/Daffy Duck cartoon and yell “Duck season!”, and no sooner does he get his bill straight than he discovers he’s drafted Mel Farr. A D-backfield is also notoriously hard to draft into. Night Train Lane matriculated at the University of Nowhere and was one of the greatest ever, but draft pedigree – which everyone does -- and you wind up staring at a heaping helping of Luther Bradley.

There is a sort of symbiosis in the fact that the two most passive positions on a football field are O-line and D-backfield. A great deal of your prowess at those positions is predicated on your ability to run backwards. The fact that Detroit has often tried to build a team around these positions suggests that ultimately the Lions are a ferocious-looking mastiff that rolls onto his back and begs you to scratch his tummy, as opposed to biting your finger off at the neck.

There might be something to that. Even Barry Sanders, the greatest Lion runner, was a poke-and-prod kind of guy as opposed to a ram-it-in-there type. While it’s hard to say what the Lions are currently or even what they should be, it’s pretty obvious that they’re not aspiring to be Bears East. O-line and D-backs would be okay with them.

And that, of course, brings us around to Detroit’s own football Armageddon, the tenure of Matt Millen as general manager. I hate to be the one to thwart a vicious frontal attack, but Millen wasn’t quite Detroit’s own little Chernobyl to the extent he’s been portrayed. He was bad, sure enough, but he was more like the Exxon Valdez than the meteorite that killed the dinosaurs: not spectacularly horrible but extremely well-documented.

His vision for the Lions may have been straight out of Steven Speilberg’s 1941 (much destruction, much shouting, no point, John Belushi), but Millen also wasn’t fortunate. With a little more patience and coaching Joey Harrington could have hit. He certainly wasn’t as much of a bona-fide pileup as Andre Ware, who had a Heisman but needed a stepladder to see above Barry Sanders. Charles Rogers likewise could have stopped hitting and hit. He was the best WR available, a consensus top-five pick; we’re not talking Darius Heyward-Bey here. Maybe if Rogers had been separated from his homies he wouldn’t have smoked like a tire dump; maybe if he had wound up in Green Bay. Or Saskatoon.

At any rate, if Harrington-to-Rogers clicks the ensuing tailwhacks never occur. Millen doesn’t need a WR and doesn’t draft Mike Williams (of the University of Scandalous Collegians), who was the consensus best available but was actually Aaron Gibson in a compression suit. (Boy, check out the WRs who went first-round in 2005: Braylon Edwards, Troy Williamson, Mark Clayton, Matt Jones, Williams, and then, at long last, Roddy White. Ooof.) Then that obviates the need for Roy Williams, yet another Big 12 receiver whose mouth runs faster than his legs, and makes Calvin Johnson, the one truly great pass-catcher in the bunch, a luxury they can afford. It all looks so easy from here.

Millen never pulled a my-kingdom-for-John-Hadl trade like Bart Starr, which sent the Packers to jail for a decade. He never dealt an entire draft for Myron Pottios, like George Allen did when he assembled the Over the Hill Gang. He was never as willfully balmy as the Bidwills. He was merely quite bad, and as the Lions’ continued struggles show, being bad is more than enough.

So what about the Lions then? Is there any hope for them being very good for a very long time? Of course there’s hope. The NFL is built on the fundamental principle that all teams are created equal until Roger Goodell decides it needs another Dallas-Pittsburgh Super Bowl. The internal dynamics of the thing aside, it wouldn’t hurt for the Lions to try the D-backfield/O-line thing again, though to make it really work they’d need to find another Joe Schmidt -- and they just traded Schmidt’s emotional half, Ernie Sims. There’s a lot to be said at any time for shutting down the pass and controlling the line. However, getting there will require more sense of purpose than we’ve seen from the Lions for some time. Anyone know what Joe Schmidt is up to?

Bob Waterfield: Imagineering At Work

Imagine a Tom Brady who doubles as a kicker, plays D-back, and shares snaps with Brett Favre because Brett Favre just happens to be around. And then imagine Tom Brady being deemed so vital to the success of the New England Patriots that the team moves to Ann Arbor so he can be closer to his alma mater and hyper-gorgeous wife.

Getting too weird yet? Such was the world of Bob Waterfield, West Coast jock, husband of quasi-actress and 18-Hour Bra spokesbust Jane Russell, rotten football coach, and marvelous go-for-broke quarterback who spent the last half of his career sharing time with another go-for-broke quarterback and semi-rotten coach, Norm van Brocklin.

The Rams' move from Cleveland to L.A. happened for reasons mostly other than Waterfield, but having your best player pining for his home and actress wife -- which happen to reside in the country's fastest-growing metro area -- certainly weren't marks in the minus column for Dan Reeves. Not with the AAFC right there in both backyards. (Which reminds us: If you're going to have a team in a two-team market, you want it to be Cleveland or LA CA?)

Waterfield didn't put up Van Brocklin's numbers but was smarter, which resurrects the Starr-vs.-Favre argument but puts the two QBs on the same team at the same time.

As with the Packers, the starting nod on the all-time Rams goes to the smarter QB over the numbers guy. Especially if he's married to Jane Russell.

Rich Saul: Help A Brother Out, Wouldja?

Rich Saul was a six-time All-Something center -- someone has to play the position, remember -- who should not be confused with his brother Ron, though we're not sure why not.

Actually, the fact that there is a Saul brother (as opposed to a Skoal brother) to not confuse begs a different question, namely: which positions are most conducive to brothers (biologically related siblings if you please, not, you know, brothers)? If your hunch was that the positions most conducive to multiple family members of the same generation (oh, heck, let's just call them brothers) are those requiring only the ability to be consistently large, you would be right.

According to the Football HOF's list of football-playing brothers there are 157 offensive linemen who are brothers with other players -- most often other offensive linemen (though not always; leave us not forget the dynamic tandem of center Dan Turk and punter Matt Turk). This is 47 more than the next closest category, running backs, but when you figure that for what is now the majority of football history a team has played two running backs and five offensive linemen, the percentage is higher of running backs who are brothers with other players.

The overall lesson appears to be that large runs in the family, but running runs in the family, too.

As for the best of the brothers, the Matthews brothers and the Upshaws get the nod over the more highly publicized modern pairs like the Barbers, the Sharpes, the Mannings, and the Joneses, but here's a dark-horse pair to consider: Charlie Taylor and his half-brother Joe "Turkey" Jones. Taylor was a no-doubter HOFer and Jones played great D-line for the Browns and other teams for a decade. Once you get intergenerational, though, it's no contest: The Matthewses rule the day.

And Now, For Something Completely Different.

Those of you who have been following me on LinkedIn know that I (i.e., Kit Kiefer) just finished a kids' book.

The story behind this book is that my then 10-year-old son Andy told me over last Christmas that he doesn't like reading.

You know how that goes. "No son of mine is going to tell me he doesn't like reading!" and so on.

I asked him why he didn't like reading. "Because there's no books about stuff I like," he said, or close.

I asked him what he liked. "You know -- mysteries about snowboarding."

I have to hand it to him. If the bookshelves are dripping with mysteries about snowboarding, it's a very surreptitious drip.

"Okay," I told him, brimming with fatherly pride. (I can't shoot a 30.06 to save my life but I can write, by jingo.) "I'll write you a mystery about snowboarding if you keep reading."

He kept his end of the deal and I kept mine, and some of the result is below. I can say without fear of contradiction that it is one of the top 100 mysteries about snowboarding ever written.

I still don't think Andy is much of a reader, but writing the book was fun. Hope you like the excerpt.


“You ever feel like you landed in a movie where everyone but you has a script, and they’ve all read the ending?” Jacob asked. There was a big bowl of buttered popcorn in front of him, and a math book, but Jacob wasn’t interested in either.

“Don’t worry about it,” Mitchelle said. “I’ve got it all figured out.”

“Got all what figured out?” Jacob said. “How do you figure that I have a stolen snowboard?"

“You have a stolen snowboard under your bed.”

Jacob shook his head again. It really was like he was in a movie, and he was the only one who didn’t know his lines. “Yeah – that.”

“All right,” Mitchelle said, and drew herself up tall. “Everyone knows that Micah was accused of stealing the snowboard, and everyone knows Micah’s your friend. I know you’d do anything for a friend. I also know you had your dad take you to Micah’s house the other night to defend your friend. Your dad went in the house to talk to Bill Cody because he knows Bill Cody and wanted to help you and Micah. When your dad was in the house you took the snowboard and hid it in your dad’s trunk, then when you got home you snuck the snowboard out of the truck. You hid it under the bed because, hey, where else would you hide it? No offense, but you’re not the most imaginative guy.”

Jacob raised his eyebrows. That was it, all of it. “So you don’t know I took the snowboard – you just have it figured out that I took the snowboard.”

“To protect your friend.”

“Yeah. So who took the snowboard in the first place?”

“Koast Summersweet, no doubt.”

Well, that part was good, Jacob thought. “And planted it at Micah’s?”

Mitchelle nodded. “I know – well, I almost know. I heard him talk. I’ve seen the hat and coat. And, come on – you take a policeman back to a place they’ve already searched because they didn’t find what you thought they’d find? Guilty. Super-guilty.”

Jacob leaned back and looked at the ceiling. It was a long way up. He blew out a long stream of air. “So what do you want me to say? I took the board from Micah’s?”

Mitchelle laughed. “I want you to say I’m right.”

“And you’re not going to sell me out to the Summersweets?”

She shook her head and looked down before looking up and into Jacob’s eyes. “I’ve been with Them – I’m not one of Them,” she said. “I decided I’d rather hang around with people who give themselves up for a friend than people who’d give up their friends for themselves.”

“And you’re not, like recording this somewhere? No iCarly hidden camera?”

“None – cross my heart.” And she actually crossed her heart.

Jacob was silent a long time, staring at the high, honey-colored ceiling. “You’re right,” he said, almost in a whisper. “I took the board from Micah’s.”

“And put it under your bed?”

“Yes, and put it under my bed – but my old bed, up in the loft over my garage.”

“Yes!” Mitchelle exclaimed with a fist pump. She looked at Jacob with a big grin. “I’ve never gotten it all right before.” She jumped up and did a little I-got-it-right dance.

“Great,” Jacob mumbled, looking down. “So are you, like, Nancy Drew?”

“Ruth Rose,” Mitchelle said with a giggle, and a little bit more of the I-got-it-right dance. “You know, in the A to Z Mysteries.”

Jacob groaned. It was just his luck – mystery girl to Ruth Rose in five minutes flat. “Okay, junior detective fortune-teller – what now?”

“Okay, here’s what’s going to happen now,” Mitchelle said, like it actually was going to happen now. “Kape Summersweet’s royally bent because Chris Carmyn stunk him. You saw that.”

“Oh, yeah,” Jacob said with a grin.

“Koast Summersweet’s coming home royally bent because he took the sheriff to find a snowboard that wasn’t there – plus he knows that after his little wild-goose chase the sheriff’s going to get suspicious.”

“With you,” Jacob said. She’s a nut – but she’s good, he thought.

“So you’ve got two royally bent Summersweets about two houses down from us, and an equipment locker that holds Chris Carmyn’s snowboard around the corner from them.”

Suddenly Jacob caught on.

“Another one of Chris Carmyn’s snowboards is going to disappear tonight,” Mitchelle said, but Jacob was already ahead of her.

“Borrow your phone?” he said quickly. Mitchelle picked it up off the table between them and tossed it to him.

Three times Jacob’s trembling fingers stumbled over his home phone number. Finally he dialed it right and hit the Talk button.

“Dad?” Jacob said into the phone. “Yeah, Dad, it’s me – Jacob. Yeah, it’s Mitchelle’s phone. Yeah, Dad – Dad? Stop. I have to ask you this, and ask you this fast, and if it sounds kinda weird it’s just the kind of day I’m having. Okay: Dad, after I came into your office and talked to you, did I come back in again?” There was a pause, and Jacob took a deep breath. “And did I say anything?” Another pause. “Okay, Dad, thanks. Gotta go. And Dad, can I stay a little later? We’re studying – uh, spelling. Okay. Nine. Bye.”

Jacob ended the call and looked at Mitchelle. “We’ve got to get to that equipment locker – now!” he said, excitedly. ”The Summersweets have the key!”

To Play, But Not To Play

There is no finer job in the world, really, than being a backup quarterback.

You go in either when the regular quarterback is injured or ineffective.

People are rooting for you.

If you stink, it’s because you’re a backup and can’t be expected to do what the starter does.

If you’re good, a star is born.

Don Trull was a professional backup quarterback. He played for six years with the Houston Oilers and the Boston Patriots, and every year he was on a card his bio read something like, “Don is being groomed for the number one signal-caller’s job.” He never did get the number one signal-caller’s job — anywhere — but he managed to stay a step ahead of Jacky Lee, who was always being groomed for Trull’s job.

Trull was better than Charlie Napper, who had the best job of all — he was the Packers’ taxi-squad quarterback for what seems like the better part of a decade — but probably not as good as Jack Concannon. The last I saw of Trull was on a set of Canadian Football League stickers, where presumably he gave the Edmonton Eskimos a fine backup who will one day be the number-one quarterback, and one of the top-notch passers in their league.

-- From the original Football with 1 Stick Gum, 1999

Warren Raab And Chuck Green -- During Meals, Even

Our phy-ed classes with Mr. Royer, the guy with the zip-in knees who looked like Burt Reynolds, fell into one of two categories: fun stuff — dodgeball, floor hockey, basketball — and dancing.

The dancing unit lasted eight months and consisted of the Virginia Reel, square dancing and novelty dances. The novelty dances consisted of “Go, You Chicken Fat, Go!” and the Hokey Pokey, which everyone hated and which resembled physical education about as much as a salt-and-flour relief map of the United States actually resembles the United States.

Whenever I see Warren Raab I think of the Hokey Pokey. The you-stick-your-right-foot-out part.

Similarly, before Jack Kemp came along, the Buffalo Bills featured the most unremittingly mediocre set of quarterbacks in the history of modern professional football. In their first three years, they trotted out Johnny “Chuck” Green, Tom O’Connell, M.C. Reynolds, defensive back Richie Lucas, Manuch Wheeler, and Bob Broadhead — and still won more than half their ballgames.

It’s easy to see why Green wasn’t a better quarterback. He suffered from some rocket-scientist’s misguided calculation that the way to get more velocity on a downfield pass was to first jump real high; he had a bad number; and he had a horrible nickname.

Quarterbacks aren’t supposed to have nicknames anyway, unless it’s something flashy, like Kenny “The Snake” Stabler or “Broadway” Joe Namath, or unless their given names are beyond hope, like Christian Adolph “Sonny” Jurgensen. But Chuck? It would be like nicknaming Gomez Addams “Lee.”

The back of Green’s card reads, “With the height and weight to take a chance at running the ball, Green worries would-be rushers because of his accuracy on the long throw.”

Uh, right. You bet.

-- From the original Football With 1 Stick Gum, 1999