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Forward thinking
Thanks to progressive minds, throwing became a mainstay, not a passing fancy
By Gary West
Star-Telegram Staff Writer
AP
Sammy Baugh
More photos
Football was a brutish and sometimes deadly game. It must have seemed more like mayhem than athletic competition, more brawl than sport. President Theodore Roosevelt called for an end to the excessive violence. University presidents and faculty inveighed against the brutality and clamored for either reform or abolition. The professional game, largely unorganized and unstable, struggled to find an audience.
But then, 100 years ago, somebody threw it, and the forward pass lifted the sport out of the mud and, eventually, into the cultural mainstream. Much of football's popularity and excitement, as well as its strategy and appeal, derive from something that started, somewhat ingloriously, in 1906.
On Oct. 27, 1906, George "Peggy" Parratt of the Massillon Tigers passed to Don "Bullet" Riley for what was the first completion in a professional football game. The very first pass, though, already had been thrown. On Sept. 5, 1906, in his second attempt, Bradbury Robinson of Saint Louis University completed a 20-yard pass to Jack Schneider.
Massillon and St. Louis both won. But the big winner, as it turned out, was football. For some, the college game was so profitable that even without reform, and despite faculty and civic protest, the mayhem might have continued. But the forward pass, at the very least, "saved football from itself," as Roland Lazenby of Virginia Tech put it. His Going Deep, a history of the forward pass, will be out next year.
Rough beginning
Yes, the forward pass saved football from itself, or from what it was back in 1905. With its origins in rugby, football had not yet traveled very far from home. Players wearing no helmets or padding would charge toward the line of scrimmage before the snap, arms might be interlocked, and then there would be a jarring confluence of force and power, with players sometimes biting, kicking and punching one another.
With a firm hold of a jersey and a timely release, players could slingshot a teammate into or over the pile. Injuries were commonplace, and deaths hardly unusual. "There was [in 1905] quite a show in the reporting of football deaths," Lazenby said. "One newspaper reported as many as 50."
But some of the reported deaths, he said, may not have resulted directly from football. On the other hand, some players apparently died from their football injuries long after the games were played, said Jerry Vickery, the curator of the Missouri Sports Hall of Fame, and so may not have been included in the original compilations.
At least 24 people died from football injuries in 1905. "There was no question," Lazenby said, "that football had become controversial, and for good reason."
Speaking before a Harvard group in the fall of 1905 and sounding as if he were ready to see an end of college football, Roosevelt said, "It is a bad thing for any college man to grow to regard sport as the serious business of life."
When two players died in separate games on Nov. 25, with a photograph of one of the bloodied bodies featured on the front page of a New York newspaper, the controversy reached a boiling point. And so Roosevelt called for a meeting to discuss the problem, saying "citadels of learning" should not become "theaters of brutality." Roosevelt's oldest son, Theodore Jr., played football at Harvard. And although the president's intervention in the football controversy might have been, in part, a nod to public relations, as Lazenby suggested, history generally credits Roosevelt with encouraging the reform that saved the game from itself.
Making a change
With the start of the 1906 season, thanks to a rules committee that would evolve into the National Collegiate Athletic Association, the forward pass became part of football. By opening up the game and creating a neutral zone, the sport, the committee believed, would become safer. But while making it possible, the new rules hardly encouraged passing. A completed pass in the end zone wasn't a touchdown, but a touchback. An incomplete pass that went out of bounds resulted in a turnover. Passing wasn't permitted within 5 yards of the line of scrimmage. But, of course, the rules would change many times over the years, starting in 1908, to encourage more and more passing, in both the college and professional games.
Nor was the original football very, well, passable. It was about as aerodynamic as a watermelon. Basically, Vickery said, the early football was a big rugby ball, more round than ovoid. Robinson, who would become a broadcaster and local celebrity in St. Louis, was the sport's first successful passer, Vickery explained, largely because he was one of the few players whose hands were large enough to grip the ball.
The football wouldn't slim down until 1912. It became more aerodynamic in 1931 and again in 1934.
And so although the new rules allowed passing, few passes were thrown initially. Many coaches opposed the pass. Even the man considered by many to be the "father of American football," Walter Camp of Yale, didn't advocate passing even though he was on the rules committee. And some fans reportedly booed whenever a player threw a pass, as if passing were nefarious. But all that soon changed.
"Back in the 1920s, Curly Lambeau would throw as many as 40 passes a game," said Lee Remmel, historian for the Green Bay Packers, about the legendary founder of the team who also played and coached. "He said he always thought throwing the ball was the quickest and easiest way to move it."
In 1929, when Green Bay signed a swift back named Johnny Blood, aka John McNally while playing for St. John's, for $100 a game, the Packers became the dominant team in the National Football League. (Lambeau offered him $110 a game if he agreed not to drink any liquor after Wednesdays, but Blood settled for the $100, according to Remmel.) Over the next three seasons, with Red Dunn passing to Blood, the Packers compiled a 34-5-2 record.
And in 1935, the rules having again loosened their constraints on passing, Don Hutson, the "Alabama Antelope," joined Blood to make the Packers' aerial show even more dazzling. Hutson, who was one of the first receivers to run precise routes, led the league in receptions for eight of the next 10 seasons and would establish virtually all of the receiving records of the time.
For many years, Lambeau relied on a formation known as the Notre Dame Box, something he had learned from legendary coach Knute Rockne while playing in South Bend, Ind. Rockne was the first to split, or "flex" as he called it, an end. In the Notre Dame Box, with the quarterback lined up behind a guard, he could take an angled snap and then fake a handoff to the tailback or fullback before throwing. It was the beginning of the "play-action" pass.
Passing threats
Meanwhile, a long, lean cowboy many would come to regard as the greatest passer ever to grip a football began his career at TCU: Slingin' Sammy Baugh. In three seasons, he led TCU to two bowl victories and a share of a national championship while throwing for 40 touchdowns and 3,384 yards, records for the time.
As a schoolboy in Sweetwater, Baugh had been a blocking back. He was more of a star at third base, and indeed he went to TCU primarily to play baseball. But Dutch Meyer, the TCU coach, agreed Baugh could also play football, for he knew the young man's reputation as a punter. But, of course, Baugh could do much more than punt and play third base. As a freshman, he apparently demonstrated a unique talent for throwing a "soft" ball with uncanny accuracy, long or short, because in his first season as the head football coach, Meyer built his offense around a deceptive double-wing formation and a passing attack. At age 92, Baugh lives in a nursing home in West Texas. Because of a recent stroke, he's unable to speak, explained his son, David. After TCU defeated LSU in the 1935 Sugar Bowl, one ranking service declared the Horned Frogs the national champion. Baugh had put TCU and the Southwest Conference in the national spotlight.
In 1937, signing with Washington for $8,000, Baugh became the highest-paid player in the NFL. He immediately led the league in passing and the Commanders to the NFL title. Baugh led the league in passing in six of his 16 seasons, and he took the Commanders to five title games. He also led in punting four times, and in 1943, he led the NFL in passing, punting and interceptions, for he also played defense.
Modern-day rebirth
While Lambeau's and Baugh's teams emphasized passing, they were exceptions in the early history of the NFL. Even in 1935, the typical NFL team averaged only 15 passes a game, completing five for 80 yards, according to the Pro Football Encyclopedia.
But in 1940, the modern passing game was born, largely in the wildly creative imagination of Clark Shaughnessy. The West Coast offense, the run-and-shoot, "The Catch," the "Immaculate Reception," the spread offense - most of modern football's most prolific offenses, much of its passing strategy and many of its most exciting moments - have their provenance in that 1940 season and specifically with Shaughnessy, who coached Stanford while also consulting with George Halas and the Bears in Chicago.
In 1939, before Shaughnessy arrived, Stanford had a single victory in nine games. But in 1940, in an historic turnaround, Stanford marched unbeaten through its 10-game schedule and then defeated Nebraska 21-13 in the Rose Bowl. "Clark Shaughnessy was a mad scientist," said Gil Brandt, the Cowboys' vice president of player personnel from 1960 to 1989 who's now the senior analyst for NFL.com and a football historian of formidable depth. "He was the father of the modern passing game." Shaughnessy introduced the modern T-formation and the hand-to-hand snap from the center to the quarterback. He spaced the offensive linemen to create running lanes, he spread out backs, he put backs in motion, and football was never quite the same.
"They would line up in a T-formation," Brandt said, referring to the 1940 Stanford team, "and then they would start doing all these exotic things off of it. It was like football advanced overnight from the typewriter to the computer. And people started to realize you could be a lesser team and still win a lot of games if you could pass the ball."
Washington was to play Chicago on Dec. 8 in the 1940 NFL championship game. Three weeks earlier, the Commanders had defeated Chicago 7-3, prompting Washington owner Preston Marshall, somewhat famously, to taunt the Bears by calling them "crybabies."
And so for the rematch, also at Griffith Stadium in Washington, Halas brought in Shaughnessy to tutor the Bears in the intricacies and possibilities of the modern T. Shaughnessy, after all, had some free time since his Stanford team had just defeated California to conclude the regular season and wouldn't play again until New Year's.
Proving to be good students, not crybabies, the Bears defeated Washington, 73-0, with Sid Luckman as the league's first modern T-formation quarterback. The erstwhile crybabies won what is still the most lopsided game in NFL history.
Very soon, of course, nearly everybody adopted a T-formation, or some variation of it. And after World War II, coach Paul Brown - who was "light-years ahead of his time," Brandt said - refined the T-formation to create a precision passing attack for his Cleveland team in the new All-America Football Conference. Brown used multiple formations with primary and secondary receivers.
But Shaughnessy wasn't finished. In 1948, he added one final brush stroke to his creation. With the Los Angeles Rams, in his only job as an NFL head coach, Shaughnessy moved Elroy Hirsch, who had been a breakaway running back, to flanker, and in doing so the mad scientist created what would become known as the "pro set."
By 1945, the typical NFL team was throwing an average of 21 passes a game, with 10 completions for 144 yards. By 1955, the averages were up to 28 passes, with 14 completions for 206 yards. And so, from 1935 to 1955, the typical NFL team nearly doubled the number of passes it attempted. In 20 years, the pass developed from being an act of desperation to a precise method of attack. Much of what has followed since then has been refinement.
The equalizer
"The main question is how are you going to win," explained Jack Pardee from his ranch near Temple. An All-American and All-Pro, Pardee coached the Bears, the Commanders and the Oilers in the NFL, as well as the University of Houston. Teams that might otherwise be overmatched, he said, can become competitive with a passing game that puts the football in the hands of talented receivers. "We would spread the field and use our speed, which was our advantage," Pardee said about the run-and-shoot offense - a description he dislikes - that he used in Houston. "We probably completed 50 percent of our passes behind the line of scrimmage or within 5 yards of it, but we tried to complete passes to give our people space."
Pardee's run-and-shoot would spread out four or even five potential receivers. And in doing so, it was built on the formations and strategies that preceded it. Some teams today, Pardee said, will use something very much like a run-and-shoot but without calling it that. "Every time I think we've done something different," said Mike Leach, the head coach at Texas Tech, which for years has had one of the most prolific passing attacks in college football, "I find out that Sammy Baugh did it in the 1930s or that somebody else did it in the 1940s. We're all copycats. You just have to find what works for you and then try to perfect it."
Last year, the average NFL team attempted 32 passes per game, with 19 completions for 218 yards. And so teams aren't throwing the ball much more than they did 50 years ago, but they're throwing it more efficiently.
And the efficiency will only get better, Brandt predicted, as the skill level rises. Many of today's players, he pointed out, become familiar with a complex passing game while still in high school. "The forward pass," he said, "has gone from the kindergarten to graduate school at MIT." And in doing so, it not only saved football from itself, but elevated it to incomparable popularity.
Top billing
At the end of the 2005 season, seven of the top 10 highest-rated passers of all time with at least 1,500 attempts were active players. The other three are in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
Quarterback Years Att. Comp. Yards TD Int Rating
Steve Young 15 4,149 2,667 33,124 232 107 96.8
Kurt Warner* 8 2,340 1,537 19,214 119 78 94.1
Peyton Manning* 8 4,333 2,769 33,189 244 130 93.5
Joe Montana 15 5,391 3,409 40,551 273 139 92.3
Daunte Culpepper* 7 2,607 1,678 20,162 135 86 91.5
Marc Bulger* 4 1,518 987 11,932 71 51 90.6
Tom Brady* 6 2,548 1,577 18,035 123 66 88.5
Trent Green* 8 3,329 2,022 25,621 150 92 88.3
Matt Hasselbeck* 7 2,205 1,342 15,925 96 57 86.64
Otto Graham 10 2,626 1,464 23,584 174 135 86.63
*Active. Source: NFL
A league of their own
The top passing performances in different levels of football through 2005:
League Quarterback Date Performance
High School David Koral, Pacific Palisades, Calif. Sept. 22, 2000 764 yards vs. Grant, Calif.
NCAA Division III Zamir Amin, Menlo Oct. 7, 2000 731 yards vs. Cal Lutheran
NCAA Division II Matt Kohn, Indianapolis Sept. 20, 2003 645 yards vs. Michigan Tech
NCAA Division I-AA Jamie Martin, Weber St. Nov. 23, 1991 624 yards vs. Idaho St.
NCAA Division I-A David Klingler, Houston Dec. 2, 1990 716 yards vs. Arizona St.
arenafootball2 Shane Stafford, Tallahassee June 2, 2000 459 yards vs. Birmingham
Arena Football League Clint Dolezel, Houston May 14, 1999 479 yards vs. Milwaukee
Canadian Football League Matt Dunigan, Winnipeg July 14, 1994 713 yards vs. Edmonton
NFL Europe Dameyune Craig, Scotland May 22, 1999 611 yards vs. Frankfurt
NFL Norm Van Brocklin, LA Rams Sept. 28, 1951 554 yards vs. NY Yanks Source: NFL
By the numbers
A look at passing yards by decade in the NFL:
Decade Passing Yards 1920s Unavailable
1933-39 69,444
1940-49 159,117
1950-59 269,009
1960-69 660,967
1970-79 677,888
1980-89 951,087
1990-99 1,025,543
2000-05 672,497
Gary West, 817- 390-7760
gwest@star-telegram.com
Thanks to progressive minds, throwing became a mainstay, not a passing fancy
By Gary West
Star-Telegram Staff Writer
AP
Sammy Baugh
More photos
Football was a brutish and sometimes deadly game. It must have seemed more like mayhem than athletic competition, more brawl than sport. President Theodore Roosevelt called for an end to the excessive violence. University presidents and faculty inveighed against the brutality and clamored for either reform or abolition. The professional game, largely unorganized and unstable, struggled to find an audience.
But then, 100 years ago, somebody threw it, and the forward pass lifted the sport out of the mud and, eventually, into the cultural mainstream. Much of football's popularity and excitement, as well as its strategy and appeal, derive from something that started, somewhat ingloriously, in 1906.
On Oct. 27, 1906, George "Peggy" Parratt of the Massillon Tigers passed to Don "Bullet" Riley for what was the first completion in a professional football game. The very first pass, though, already had been thrown. On Sept. 5, 1906, in his second attempt, Bradbury Robinson of Saint Louis University completed a 20-yard pass to Jack Schneider.
Massillon and St. Louis both won. But the big winner, as it turned out, was football. For some, the college game was so profitable that even without reform, and despite faculty and civic protest, the mayhem might have continued. But the forward pass, at the very least, "saved football from itself," as Roland Lazenby of Virginia Tech put it. His Going Deep, a history of the forward pass, will be out next year.
Rough beginning
Yes, the forward pass saved football from itself, or from what it was back in 1905. With its origins in rugby, football had not yet traveled very far from home. Players wearing no helmets or padding would charge toward the line of scrimmage before the snap, arms might be interlocked, and then there would be a jarring confluence of force and power, with players sometimes biting, kicking and punching one another.
With a firm hold of a jersey and a timely release, players could slingshot a teammate into or over the pile. Injuries were commonplace, and deaths hardly unusual. "There was [in 1905] quite a show in the reporting of football deaths," Lazenby said. "One newspaper reported as many as 50."
But some of the reported deaths, he said, may not have resulted directly from football. On the other hand, some players apparently died from their football injuries long after the games were played, said Jerry Vickery, the curator of the Missouri Sports Hall of Fame, and so may not have been included in the original compilations.
At least 24 people died from football injuries in 1905. "There was no question," Lazenby said, "that football had become controversial, and for good reason."
Speaking before a Harvard group in the fall of 1905 and sounding as if he were ready to see an end of college football, Roosevelt said, "It is a bad thing for any college man to grow to regard sport as the serious business of life."
When two players died in separate games on Nov. 25, with a photograph of one of the bloodied bodies featured on the front page of a New York newspaper, the controversy reached a boiling point. And so Roosevelt called for a meeting to discuss the problem, saying "citadels of learning" should not become "theaters of brutality." Roosevelt's oldest son, Theodore Jr., played football at Harvard. And although the president's intervention in the football controversy might have been, in part, a nod to public relations, as Lazenby suggested, history generally credits Roosevelt with encouraging the reform that saved the game from itself.
Making a change
With the start of the 1906 season, thanks to a rules committee that would evolve into the National Collegiate Athletic Association, the forward pass became part of football. By opening up the game and creating a neutral zone, the sport, the committee believed, would become safer. But while making it possible, the new rules hardly encouraged passing. A completed pass in the end zone wasn't a touchdown, but a touchback. An incomplete pass that went out of bounds resulted in a turnover. Passing wasn't permitted within 5 yards of the line of scrimmage. But, of course, the rules would change many times over the years, starting in 1908, to encourage more and more passing, in both the college and professional games.
Nor was the original football very, well, passable. It was about as aerodynamic as a watermelon. Basically, Vickery said, the early football was a big rugby ball, more round than ovoid. Robinson, who would become a broadcaster and local celebrity in St. Louis, was the sport's first successful passer, Vickery explained, largely because he was one of the few players whose hands were large enough to grip the ball.
The football wouldn't slim down until 1912. It became more aerodynamic in 1931 and again in 1934.
And so although the new rules allowed passing, few passes were thrown initially. Many coaches opposed the pass. Even the man considered by many to be the "father of American football," Walter Camp of Yale, didn't advocate passing even though he was on the rules committee. And some fans reportedly booed whenever a player threw a pass, as if passing were nefarious. But all that soon changed.
"Back in the 1920s, Curly Lambeau would throw as many as 40 passes a game," said Lee Remmel, historian for the Green Bay Packers, about the legendary founder of the team who also played and coached. "He said he always thought throwing the ball was the quickest and easiest way to move it."
In 1929, when Green Bay signed a swift back named Johnny Blood, aka John McNally while playing for St. John's, for $100 a game, the Packers became the dominant team in the National Football League. (Lambeau offered him $110 a game if he agreed not to drink any liquor after Wednesdays, but Blood settled for the $100, according to Remmel.) Over the next three seasons, with Red Dunn passing to Blood, the Packers compiled a 34-5-2 record.
And in 1935, the rules having again loosened their constraints on passing, Don Hutson, the "Alabama Antelope," joined Blood to make the Packers' aerial show even more dazzling. Hutson, who was one of the first receivers to run precise routes, led the league in receptions for eight of the next 10 seasons and would establish virtually all of the receiving records of the time.
For many years, Lambeau relied on a formation known as the Notre Dame Box, something he had learned from legendary coach Knute Rockne while playing in South Bend, Ind. Rockne was the first to split, or "flex" as he called it, an end. In the Notre Dame Box, with the quarterback lined up behind a guard, he could take an angled snap and then fake a handoff to the tailback or fullback before throwing. It was the beginning of the "play-action" pass.
Passing threats
Meanwhile, a long, lean cowboy many would come to regard as the greatest passer ever to grip a football began his career at TCU: Slingin' Sammy Baugh. In three seasons, he led TCU to two bowl victories and a share of a national championship while throwing for 40 touchdowns and 3,384 yards, records for the time.
As a schoolboy in Sweetwater, Baugh had been a blocking back. He was more of a star at third base, and indeed he went to TCU primarily to play baseball. But Dutch Meyer, the TCU coach, agreed Baugh could also play football, for he knew the young man's reputation as a punter. But, of course, Baugh could do much more than punt and play third base. As a freshman, he apparently demonstrated a unique talent for throwing a "soft" ball with uncanny accuracy, long or short, because in his first season as the head football coach, Meyer built his offense around a deceptive double-wing formation and a passing attack. At age 92, Baugh lives in a nursing home in West Texas. Because of a recent stroke, he's unable to speak, explained his son, David. After TCU defeated LSU in the 1935 Sugar Bowl, one ranking service declared the Horned Frogs the national champion. Baugh had put TCU and the Southwest Conference in the national spotlight.
In 1937, signing with Washington for $8,000, Baugh became the highest-paid player in the NFL. He immediately led the league in passing and the Commanders to the NFL title. Baugh led the league in passing in six of his 16 seasons, and he took the Commanders to five title games. He also led in punting four times, and in 1943, he led the NFL in passing, punting and interceptions, for he also played defense.
Modern-day rebirth
While Lambeau's and Baugh's teams emphasized passing, they were exceptions in the early history of the NFL. Even in 1935, the typical NFL team averaged only 15 passes a game, completing five for 80 yards, according to the Pro Football Encyclopedia.
But in 1940, the modern passing game was born, largely in the wildly creative imagination of Clark Shaughnessy. The West Coast offense, the run-and-shoot, "The Catch," the "Immaculate Reception," the spread offense - most of modern football's most prolific offenses, much of its passing strategy and many of its most exciting moments - have their provenance in that 1940 season and specifically with Shaughnessy, who coached Stanford while also consulting with George Halas and the Bears in Chicago.
In 1939, before Shaughnessy arrived, Stanford had a single victory in nine games. But in 1940, in an historic turnaround, Stanford marched unbeaten through its 10-game schedule and then defeated Nebraska 21-13 in the Rose Bowl. "Clark Shaughnessy was a mad scientist," said Gil Brandt, the Cowboys' vice president of player personnel from 1960 to 1989 who's now the senior analyst for NFL.com and a football historian of formidable depth. "He was the father of the modern passing game." Shaughnessy introduced the modern T-formation and the hand-to-hand snap from the center to the quarterback. He spaced the offensive linemen to create running lanes, he spread out backs, he put backs in motion, and football was never quite the same.
"They would line up in a T-formation," Brandt said, referring to the 1940 Stanford team, "and then they would start doing all these exotic things off of it. It was like football advanced overnight from the typewriter to the computer. And people started to realize you could be a lesser team and still win a lot of games if you could pass the ball."
Washington was to play Chicago on Dec. 8 in the 1940 NFL championship game. Three weeks earlier, the Commanders had defeated Chicago 7-3, prompting Washington owner Preston Marshall, somewhat famously, to taunt the Bears by calling them "crybabies."
And so for the rematch, also at Griffith Stadium in Washington, Halas brought in Shaughnessy to tutor the Bears in the intricacies and possibilities of the modern T. Shaughnessy, after all, had some free time since his Stanford team had just defeated California to conclude the regular season and wouldn't play again until New Year's.
Proving to be good students, not crybabies, the Bears defeated Washington, 73-0, with Sid Luckman as the league's first modern T-formation quarterback. The erstwhile crybabies won what is still the most lopsided game in NFL history.
Very soon, of course, nearly everybody adopted a T-formation, or some variation of it. And after World War II, coach Paul Brown - who was "light-years ahead of his time," Brandt said - refined the T-formation to create a precision passing attack for his Cleveland team in the new All-America Football Conference. Brown used multiple formations with primary and secondary receivers.
But Shaughnessy wasn't finished. In 1948, he added one final brush stroke to his creation. With the Los Angeles Rams, in his only job as an NFL head coach, Shaughnessy moved Elroy Hirsch, who had been a breakaway running back, to flanker, and in doing so the mad scientist created what would become known as the "pro set."
By 1945, the typical NFL team was throwing an average of 21 passes a game, with 10 completions for 144 yards. By 1955, the averages were up to 28 passes, with 14 completions for 206 yards. And so, from 1935 to 1955, the typical NFL team nearly doubled the number of passes it attempted. In 20 years, the pass developed from being an act of desperation to a precise method of attack. Much of what has followed since then has been refinement.
The equalizer
"The main question is how are you going to win," explained Jack Pardee from his ranch near Temple. An All-American and All-Pro, Pardee coached the Bears, the Commanders and the Oilers in the NFL, as well as the University of Houston. Teams that might otherwise be overmatched, he said, can become competitive with a passing game that puts the football in the hands of talented receivers. "We would spread the field and use our speed, which was our advantage," Pardee said about the run-and-shoot offense - a description he dislikes - that he used in Houston. "We probably completed 50 percent of our passes behind the line of scrimmage or within 5 yards of it, but we tried to complete passes to give our people space."
Pardee's run-and-shoot would spread out four or even five potential receivers. And in doing so, it was built on the formations and strategies that preceded it. Some teams today, Pardee said, will use something very much like a run-and-shoot but without calling it that. "Every time I think we've done something different," said Mike Leach, the head coach at Texas Tech, which for years has had one of the most prolific passing attacks in college football, "I find out that Sammy Baugh did it in the 1930s or that somebody else did it in the 1940s. We're all copycats. You just have to find what works for you and then try to perfect it."
Last year, the average NFL team attempted 32 passes per game, with 19 completions for 218 yards. And so teams aren't throwing the ball much more than they did 50 years ago, but they're throwing it more efficiently.
And the efficiency will only get better, Brandt predicted, as the skill level rises. Many of today's players, he pointed out, become familiar with a complex passing game while still in high school. "The forward pass," he said, "has gone from the kindergarten to graduate school at MIT." And in doing so, it not only saved football from itself, but elevated it to incomparable popularity.
Top billing
At the end of the 2005 season, seven of the top 10 highest-rated passers of all time with at least 1,500 attempts were active players. The other three are in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
Quarterback Years Att. Comp. Yards TD Int Rating
Steve Young 15 4,149 2,667 33,124 232 107 96.8
Kurt Warner* 8 2,340 1,537 19,214 119 78 94.1
Peyton Manning* 8 4,333 2,769 33,189 244 130 93.5
Joe Montana 15 5,391 3,409 40,551 273 139 92.3
Daunte Culpepper* 7 2,607 1,678 20,162 135 86 91.5
Marc Bulger* 4 1,518 987 11,932 71 51 90.6
Tom Brady* 6 2,548 1,577 18,035 123 66 88.5
Trent Green* 8 3,329 2,022 25,621 150 92 88.3
Matt Hasselbeck* 7 2,205 1,342 15,925 96 57 86.64
Otto Graham 10 2,626 1,464 23,584 174 135 86.63
*Active. Source: NFL
A league of their own
The top passing performances in different levels of football through 2005:
League Quarterback Date Performance
High School David Koral, Pacific Palisades, Calif. Sept. 22, 2000 764 yards vs. Grant, Calif.
NCAA Division III Zamir Amin, Menlo Oct. 7, 2000 731 yards vs. Cal Lutheran
NCAA Division II Matt Kohn, Indianapolis Sept. 20, 2003 645 yards vs. Michigan Tech
NCAA Division I-AA Jamie Martin, Weber St. Nov. 23, 1991 624 yards vs. Idaho St.
NCAA Division I-A David Klingler, Houston Dec. 2, 1990 716 yards vs. Arizona St.
arenafootball2 Shane Stafford, Tallahassee June 2, 2000 459 yards vs. Birmingham
Arena Football League Clint Dolezel, Houston May 14, 1999 479 yards vs. Milwaukee
Canadian Football League Matt Dunigan, Winnipeg July 14, 1994 713 yards vs. Edmonton
NFL Europe Dameyune Craig, Scotland May 22, 1999 611 yards vs. Frankfurt
NFL Norm Van Brocklin, LA Rams Sept. 28, 1951 554 yards vs. NY Yanks Source: NFL
By the numbers
A look at passing yards by decade in the NFL:
Decade Passing Yards 1920s Unavailable
1933-39 69,444
1940-49 159,117
1950-59 269,009
1960-69 660,967
1970-79 677,888
1980-89 951,087
1990-99 1,025,543
2000-05 672,497
Gary West, 817- 390-7760
gwest@star-telegram.com
