Lynn Dickey missed the Packers’ annual alumni game a few years back, thanks to hip replacement surgery. Although the former Green Bay Packers quarterback called the surgery “life changing” for him, it killed him to miss his favorite fall weekend, when former players from across the country travel to Lambeau Field to reconnect—teasing each other about their receding hairlines and expanding waistlines—and reminisce. Dickey hasn’t missed another alumni game and has been to virtually every other one since his 10-year Packers career ended in 1985. “That is a great weekend,” Dickey said. “We all get to hang out and lie about how good we used to be.”
Except Dickey doesn’t have to lie about that. When Brett Favre was enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2016, he joined the Packers’ other iconic quarterback of the modern era, Bart Starr, in Canton, Ohio. Someday, Aaron Rodgers—with his NFL MVPs and Super Bowl XLV title—will almost certainly join them. Largely left out of the greatest quarterbacks in Packers history conversation is Dickey, who had the unfortunate timing of playing on the decidedly mediocre teams of the 1980s. His unlucky trifecta—a poor defense, an inconsistent running game, and his own mobility-robbing injuries—makes him a what-if theoretical member, even though those who saw him play believe he deserves to be included.
Pro Football Hall of Fame wide receiver James Lofton played nine seasons with the Packers (1978–1986) and spent four years with Jim Kelly’s Buffalo Bills (1989–1992). “Whenever people ask me the best quarterback I’ve ever played with, it’s always a leading question because they’re thinking Jim Kelly will be my answer,” Lofton said. “But every receiver has ‘his’ quarterback, and my quarterback was Lynn Dickey. There’s a chemistry, a mind link that you have with a quarterback that you can only have with one guy. You can’t have two guys. I’m coming up on 40 years in pro football as a player, coach, and analyst, and the longer I’m in it, the more I appreciate how good Lynn Dickey was. If he were playing in today’s game—and that’s one of those scenarios that as an analyst you don’t normally talk about—but if he was in today’s game, where you can’t hit a quarterback except above the knees and below the shoulders, he would carve up the NFL. Yes, Jim Kelly’s in the Hall of Fame, but those two guys are close to the same level.”
And Lofton knew it almost immediately. A first-round pick in 1978, Lofton initially played with David Whitehurst at quarterback while Dickey recovered from a broken leg. Then, late in the 1979 season, Lofton played his first game with “his” quarterback. “Then toward the end of the 1979 season, Lynn Dickey gets healthy. He comes in late in the year, and I go, ‘Oh, this is what a great passer is like.’ There were things he could do with a ball that were kind of like what Magic Johnson could do on a fast break,” Lofton said.
Lofton isn’t alone with that opinion. Larry McCarren was Dickey’s center before spending nearly 30 years as a local sportscaster and becoming a radio analyst for the Packers Radio Network. “From my perspective—and I didn’t get to see much of it during a game—but watching him on film the next day, he was the most accurate deep thrower I’ve ever seen,” McCarren said. “And there was no dinkin’ and dunkin’ in that offense. It was intermediate to deep. Now, he wasn’t going to knock over the side of a barn a la Brett or Aaron. Both those guys were blessed with howitzers for arms, but Lynn was extremely effective, extremely accurate, and he had all the arm strength he needed.”
Packers team historian Cliff Christl covered the team for nearly 40 years for four Wisconsin newspapers, starting in 1974. Dickey impressed him. “Nobody would ever question his toughness, his will to win, his competitiveness,” Christl said. “He had some remarkable games, and when I think of picture perfect passes, I think of Lynn Dickey. The guy could throw the ball, especially the tough passes, as well as anybody I’ve seen. Aaron Rodgers is a pinpoint passer. Brett Favre had a great arm, maybe a little more unconventional, but was a great passer. I think Dickey is in their category. But I don’t know if being a great passer makes you a great quarterback. And I say that with great respect for Lynn Dickey’s leadership, football knowledge, commitment as a player. You couldn’t fault any of that. But he couldn’t move. I wrote once when he was playing that if the NFL was touch football, he’d be a Hall of Famer and he would be. And I’m sure a big part of it was the major injuries to his lower body he suffered over the years.”
Those injuries began with the Houston Oilers in 1972, when Dickey fractured and dislocated his hip in his second NFL season. He underwent surgery in Boston and spent three weeks in traction and lost 40 pounds. He was never the same. “He was a really good player, then he hurt his hip—a tragic injury,” said retired Packers general manager Ted Thompson, who played with Dickey on the Oilers. “He was rolling in Houston, as I understand it, before I got there, before he had the hip injury.”
An underrated quarterback in Packers history, Lynn Dickey readies to pass during a 1982 game at Lambeau Field.
It though, wasn’t Dickey’s only major injury. After being traded to Green Bay in 1976, Dickey broke the tibia and fibula in his lower leg in 1977, missing the rest of that season and all of 1978. The injury required four surgeries to repair. “Don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t running 4.5 40s before those injuries, but I was okay [as an athlete],” Dickey said. “You didn’t have to get the sundial out to watch me run. But [the hip injury] really affected me. When you get below the waist and start breaking hips and knees, those take a long time to rehab and get them back. I used to dunk a basketball quite easily. And it got to the point where I was having a hard time just touching the rim. It was bad.”
Dickey had other injuries as well. A separated shoulder sidelined him in 1976, he played in only five games in 1979, and back problems plagued him throughout his career. So when he returned to the team in 1980, he came to Starr, then the Packers head coach, and offensive coordinator Zeke Bratkowski with a request. When he had arrived from Houston, he had wanted to wear No. 12, but it was taken. Dickey settled for No. 10, the number he had worn with the Oilers. When his buzzard’s luck continued with injuries, he asked Bratkowski, who had worn No. 12 while backing up Starr on Vince Lombardi’s championship teams, if he could take his old number. Bratkowski was all for it, so Dickey went to Starr. “I said to Bart, ‘Not that I’m superstitious, but enough is enough,’” Dickey said.
With the new number came newfound good health, and from 1980 through 1985, Dickey was one of the league’s top passers. In Packers history only Favre (61,655), Rodgers (42,944), and Starr (24,718) have thrown for more yards than Dickey (21,369), even though Dickey played in just 105 games with the team—fewer than Rodgers (165), Starr (196), and Favre (255). He was at his absolute best in 1983, when he led the NFL in passing yards (4,458), touchdown passes (32), yards per attempt (9.2), and yards per completion (15.4). He led the Packers that season to three fourth-quarter comebacks and four game-winning drives, the most memorable of which was the team’s 48–47 victory against the defending Super Bowl-champion Washington Redskins on Monday Night Football. But his passer rating was just 87.3 because he also threw an NFL-high 29 interceptions.
That risk-taking approach was the product of the Packers’ perennially struggling defense. The Packers were fifth in the league in scoring offense (429 points) and second in yardage (6,172) in the 28-team league in 1983. But their defense was the second worst in points allowed (439) and worst in yards allowed (6,403). “We were constantly playing catch-up,” Dickey said. “Bart knew this, the defensive guys knew it, everybody knew it. So Bart would tell me, ‘Don’t worry about throwing interceptions.’ I would have liked to have been able to play the game like the ’85 Bears. As good as they were, my mom could have played quarterback on that team. Jim McMahon, I’m sure it was very frustrating for him because Mike Ditka would tell him, ‘Our defense is so good, and we’ve got a good running game. Do not turn it over. If it’s wide open, throw it; if it isn’t, throw it in the stands because our defense is going to get the ball back here in three plays.’ But I did not have that luxury. Bart would say, ‘If we don’t score 40 points, we’re going to lose.’”
A third-round pick from Kansas State in 1971 who predated free agency by two decades, Dickey spent his first five NFL seasons in Houston trapped behind starter Dan Pastorini on the Oilers’ depth chart. When he asked coach Bum Phillips to be traded before the 1975 season, Phillips refused but agreed to deal him after the season ended. Dickey had hoped to go to the Denver Broncos, whose quarterback, Charley Johnson, had just retired. “I knew they had a really good running game, and they had a good defense,” Dickey said. “And those were the two things I was looking for in a team because if you don’t have that, you can’t win a Super Bowl.”
But then-Broncos coach John Ralston wasn’t interested, and Dickey instead was shipped to Green Bay, where ex-Oilers assistant Lew Carpenter was on Starr’s staff. The Packers gave up aging quarterback John Hadl, defensive back Ken Ellis, and two draft picks in the April 1976 trade. Had he been dealt to the Broncos, perhaps Dickey’s career would have been different. While Green Bay went 22–37–1 from 1976 through 1979, the Broncos, led by their Orange Crush defense, went 41–19.
In fact, the Packers finished with a winning record just twice during Dickey’s 10 years in Green Bay. In 1978 they went 8–7–1 with Dickey on injured reserve with a broken leg and in a strike-shortened 1982 season they went 5–3–1 and beat the St. Louis Cardinals 41–16 in a frigid playoff game at Lambeau Field. “I just kept thinking, Man, mid-January, it’s the playoffs at Lambeau Field. It doesn’t get any better than this,” Dickey said.
Unfortunately, it never would get any better than that. That season marked Green Bay’s only playoff berth during Dickey’s time as the starter, during which the Packers went 43–56–2.
As a result, his career is essentially defined by what ifs. What if he had played elsewhere? What if he didn’t have so many injuries? What if the Packers had been better defensively during his most productive seasons? “You can ‘if’ yourself to death,” Dickey said. “I’ve always looked at it—and I looked at it like this when I was playing—that you just have to be lucky to be in the right place at the right time with all the pieces around you, especially as a quarterback. I realized that when I was playing, so it did not drive me nuts the rest of my career or once I was done.”
Dickey says he has no regrets and is at peace with his career. He knows the player he was and could have been, and if the Packers ever acquire a time machine and hold a three-way tryout for the starting job among him, Favre, and Rodgers…well, bring it on. “I’m in,” he said. “I would have no problem with that. I think I could have played with anybody. There’s lots of guys who had pretty good careers but never really won a championship, and I felt pretty lucky that I got to play. [I] didn’t get to do everything I wanted to, but that’s okay. I had a wonderful time, a wonderful career. I can’t tell you how many times I stepped in the huddle, looked at my guys, and said, ‘Can you believe they’re paying us to do this? This is great. I love this.’ And that’s the way I played the game. I got hurt a lot, had some injuries, but boy, I really loved what I got to do. I looked at it like, if you gave me 100 bucks a game, I’d take it. And I’d be here every week. I loved it.”