#41
BART STARR
Bart Starr is perhaps the most underrated performer in NFL history. People who aren’t old enough to have seen him play see his statistics and see that the most passes he ever threw in a season was 295 and that 16 touchdown passes was the most he ever threw in a year. Ordinary numbers for an ordinary quarterback.
Nothing could be further from the truth. First off, Starr won five NFL championships in a seven-year period, including three in a row. Joe Montana won four titles and so did Terry Bradshaw. Nobody ever won more from 1960 going forward.
Take a look inside the numbers. Starr may be more responsible for turning the NFL into a passing league than any other individual. Here’s why:
The Green Bay Packers had a redoubtable ground attack with Jim Taylor and Paul Hornung. Later on, Chuck Mercein took on a key role as did Donny Anderson and Jim Grabowski. With Vince Lombardi at the helm, the Packers were seen as a running team. But the numbers disagree with the perception.
The Packers averaged 3.4 yards per carry in 1965, 11th-best in the NFL. However, their 8.2 yards per pass average ranked second in the league, and they defeated Jim Brown and the Cleveland Browns in the NFL Championship Game.
The Packers averaged 3.5 yards per rush in 1966, ranking 14th in the league, but they finished first in the league in yards per pass at 8.9 yards per attempt and they went on to beat the Dallas Cowboys in the NFL Championship Game.
In 1967, the Packers finished fourth in yards per rushing attempt at 4.0 per carry, a big improvement over the previous two seasons. But, once again, they finished first in the league with an average of 8.3 yards per pass. Starr averaged 8.7 yards per pass. (The team’s figure is lower because he gave way in a couple of games to backup Zeke Bratkowski.) The Packers went on to beat the Dallas Cowboys in the “Ice Bowl” for the NFL championship and then beat the Oakland Raiders in Super Bowl II.
Starr averaged 7.8 yards per attempt for his career, a better figure than Dan Marino, Joe Montana, Peyton Manning, or Terry Bradshaw. He was accurate in every big game he played and he led the Packers to a 9–1 mark in postseason games, earning the MVP award in each of the first two Super Bowls.
He also came up with his most memorable performance under the horrific conditions of the Ice Bowl. The brutally cold game should have been a two-yards-and-a-cloud-of-dust taffy pull, but neither Starr nor underrated Dallas Cowboy quarterback Don Meredith would let that happen. The game came down to a last-minute drive that Starr directed with the temperature having dropped to minus-18 degrees. The drive is best remembered for Starr sneaking into the end zone over guard Jerry Kramer, whose block of Jethro Pugh was the decisive play in the game. However, while Starr ended the game with a run, he directed the drive by going 5 of 5 for 59 yards and defining the word leadership.
His memory of that final play is still as strong as ever.
“The play call was that Chuck Mercein would get the ball,” Starr told Kerry Byrne of the website Cold, Hard, Football Facts. “That was our lead play in the game in that situation. We had recognized that the Cowboys had a very strong solid approach on short yardage. I don’t know what they called it, but we labeled it the submarine technique. Their defensive linemen submarined down so well that you couldn’t knock them back. But [Cowboys defensive tackle] Jethro Pugh was so tall, he couldn’t get down as low as the other guys. So we thought we could get under him. We had run that play two other times in the game and got a minimum of two yards each time, so we knew it would work. But at the end of the game, the ground had grown so hard and a running play was a risk because of the ice on the ground.
“So I asked the linemen if they could get their footing for one play, and then on the sideline I said to coach that there’s nothing wrong with the play. I said I can shuffle my feet and slide in. I felt like I was under control and not slipping. All he said to me was, ‘Let’s run it and get the hell out of here.’”
That championship, the Packers’ third straight, is Starr’s fondest memory of his football career.
Starr’s career could very easily have never started. He was drafted out of Alabama in the 17th round of the 1956 draft. He was thought to have ordinary athletic ability and an ordinary arm. When Lombardi was hired by the Packers prior to the 1959 season, he spent much of the offseason looking at Packers films and he discovered that Starr had everything he was looking for in a quarterback. He was an accurate passer and had adequate arm strength. He had good mechanics, great ball-handling skills, read defenses well, and made excellent decisions. Lombardi’s assessment of what had been a non-descript first three years in the NFL for Starr was the key move behind Green Bay’s championship run.
If the coach saw Starr as the ideal quarterback to lead his team, the quarterback saw Lombardi in similar terms. He didn’t have any negatives from his perspective. “The man was so fundamentally strong and committed his life to the right priorities,” Starr said. “It was God, family, and then the others—and we were the others. He wanted us to live our lives that way, too. It was a joy to work with him. He was very, very bright, extremely committed and uniquely well organized.
“Until he came, I was just one of the QBs there. We were being rotated and moved around. We had a come-from-behind win and from then on I was the starting QB. I think for him it was matter of him finding out who was going to be a leader. I can’t say what he might have seen. But I was highly motivated to want to continue to improve and get an opportunity to show him. He gave us an opportunity and we were able to capitalize on it. I feel very fortunate to have him come along. He was everything I would have hoped for. A marvelous, marvelous teacher, coach, and leader. So when you have someone like that, it’s very inspiring.”
It’s probably the best quarterback-coach combination in NFL history, with Bill Walsh and Joe Montana being a close second.