The 1968 season was the penultimate year for the American Football League. And after consecutive defeats to the Green Bay Packers in the retroactively renamed Super Bowls I and II, the AFL was still seeking respectability from the NFL. In ’68, five of the ten AFL teams were committed to their starting quarterbacks, with those signal callers starting at least 13 games. Years later, three of those five QBs would find themselves in the Pro Football Hall of Fame, while the other two would have continue to have solid, respectable careers transitioning to a united AFL/NFL two years later.
Tag Archives: AFL MVP
Jack Kemp
Like Len Dawson and George Blanda, Jack Kemp was one of the “rejects”, an NFL castoff who found success in the fledgling American Football League (AFL). To date, he remains the only quarterback to bring Buffalo a championship… and he won two of them. But before he was a starter in the pass-emphasized AFL, Kemp was a 17thround pick out of Occidental College. He would throw just 18 passes for the Pittsburgh Steelers during his lone NFL season in 1957, and he’d spend a year playing for the Calgary Stampeders of the CFL in ’59. With the AFL in need of immediate legitimacy, the hometown boy lined up under Center for the Los Angeles Chargers in 1960, the league’s inaugural season.
Best Quarterbacks: The AFL
The American Football League took the field from 1960-1969 and evolved from an oft-dismissed “second-rate” competition into a pass-happy equal of the National Football League, eventually absorbed by the NFL to begin the 1970 season. The league’s greatest highlight was their New York Jets upsetting a potent Baltimore Colts team in Super Bowl III. But contrary to popular history, the merger was not triggered by that upset, but rather an agreement in June of 1966 to end a relentless bidding war.
Daryle Lamonica
The whole purpose of writing this blog was to look at quarterbacks compared to their era, not my personal opinion. So, yes, even I was shocked that Daryle Lamonica finished ahead of guys like Favre, Marino, and Elway. I had to check his numbers four or five times, but yes, based upon my formula, he’s the tenth greatest quarterback, since 1950. That’s because when he became the starting QB for the Oakland Raiders in the late ‘60s, he was putting up numbers that were simply remarkable for the time. He lived up to his nickname, “The Mad Bomber”, given to him by Howard Cosell for his penchant to throw the ball deep. While unlikely to get his bust in Canton, if there’s one thing I’ve learned about Daryle Lamonica, is that he’s the most criminally underrated passer in the history of the game.
George Blanda
A lot of people will say that George Blanda is only in the Hall of Fame because he played so long. Turns out that, statistically, he’s much better than he often gets credit for. He was one of the pioneers of the pass-emphasized play that made the AFL so much fun and put up some tremendous numbers that were little-seen in pro football before 1960. An NFL castaway who didn’t even start playing in the AFL until his thirties, he managed to redeem himself and provided the league with much-needed early legitimacy before the arrival of future stars like Joe Namath, John Hadl, and Daryle Lamonica.
Joe Namath
Joe Namath’s place among the greatest quarterbacks of all time is among the most hotly debated. His defenders point to his role in the greatest upset in pro football history, and his ridiculous 4,000-yard passing season in an era when 2,500 yards was considered pretty elite. His detractors point to the fact that his career completion percentage is just a hair over 50% and he threw nearly 50 more interceptions than touchdown passes. Regardless of the stats though, his role is one of the most important in the evolution of football overtaking baseball as the country’s most popular spectator sport. This is emphasized by the NFL Network naming him the #1 “character” in the league’s first 100 years. So, pro or con, it is impossible to dismiss the legacy of Broadway Joe.
Tobin Rote
Tobin Rote’s athletic prowess enabled him to change the game of football. He is one of (if not the first) dual threat quarterbacks. Unlike a smaller signal caller, such as a Fran Tarkenton, who used scrambling equally due to his speed and as a life-preserving measure, Rote was more like a fullback utilizing his 6’2” and 211-pound frame to bulldoze opponents. The Green Bay Packers saw this potential from the Rice University product and drafted him in the second round of the 1950 draft to help an offense that finished dead last the previous year, coincidentally Curly Lambeau’s final season as Packers head coach.
The Quarterback Project 