Big John U.
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Suppose you're the coach of the Baltimore Colts in the early 1950's, and you need a back-up quarterback. So what do you do?
Look for a good college player? Search for a promising free agent? Send your scouts up to the Canadian Football League?
Nah, you just go to Pittsburgh and hire a construction worker. Certainly it will help if the construction worker can play football. But that would be likely enough since the city had a thriving semi-pro league. And sure enough, there was a construction worker making $6 a game playing semi-pro. Sometimes, they met in Deans Field a baseball field by Pittsburgh's Bloomfield Bridge and at other times in the fields of the Arsenal Junior High School (Now Arsenal Middleschool) in the Lawrenceville neighborhood.
Actually Johnny Unitas had been a college football star at the University of Louisville and in 1955 was drafted into the professional National Football League by the Pittsburgh Steelers. John didn't do too bad in the training camp in Olean, New York. In one scrimmage he had thrown two touchdown passes.
But for some reason Steelers Coach Walt Kiesling didn't see any reason to put John on the team. After all, they had three quarterbacks already and a fourth would be just dead weight. So in the pre-season exhibitions Johny wasn't even sent into any of the games. When the camp was over, the team just handed him $10 for bus fare home. Ever frugal, John kept the money and hitchhiked back to Pittsburgh.
Naturally John was irritated since he hadn't even been allowed to play in a regulation game. And he wasn't giving up his plans to go to the pros. Pittsburgh was a football town and it was to keep in shape that he joined the Bloomfield Rams in the fall of 1955.
Although most people cite John's pay at $6 a game and this sounds unbelievably chintzy, it was enough to pay for a good part of the week's groceries. You could buy two loaves of bread, two gallons of milk, ten pounds of potatoes, one pot roast, and four sirloin steaks all for $5.70. The reality was the pay was quite variable and depended on how many people would show up and pay the $3 fee to watch the men play. If 1000 people showed up, after deducting expenses, there might be $500 to divvy up between the teams. Then as now better players got better pay and by the end of the season John was actually pulling in $15 per game.
But John's semi-pro teammates - who ranged from mill workers to bartenders - were not sanguine about his aspirations. They even laughed at the thought that their second string quarterback - the starting quarterback was the team's owner - could become a pro player. "Hey, John," they would call, "Did you hear that the Los Angeles Rams wants me for their team?"
It's not like the football gurus didn't know who John was. After all, he was picked in the 9th round of the 1955 NFL draft (#102 overall). After he left the Steelers, John had written letters to various coaches for a spot on their teams. Some inquiries bore fruit. Although it was too late for John to play in the 1955 season, Cleveland's Paul Brown - not a man to pick players willy-nilly - invited him to the next year's training camp.
According to one story it was not John, but a fan who wrote to the Baltimore Colts and told the coach, Wilbur "Weeb" Ewbank, about the Wunderkind of the Pittsburgh Sandlots. Weeb would later jokingly accuse John of having written the letter himself. But whoever the author was, Weeb wrote back to John that they would give him a try.
Of course, by then Weeb was ready to try anything. From 1953 to 1956 the Baltimore Colts had not - as the businessmen say - met projected expectations. In those four years the team had racked up a paltry 16-31-1 record. John showed up in camp and made the team.
He remained, though, just a back-up quarterback. Then in the fourth game of 1956 - John's first year on a professional team - Baltimore was playing the Chicago Bears. Early in the game the Colts starting quarterback, George Shaw, was injured and was out for the rest of the season. Now was John's big chance.
Unfortunately, his debut was a bit rough and for his first pass John threw an interception. Then as the game progressed he fumbled and lost the ball three times. Not surprisingly, the Bears won - and at 58-27.
Clearly John's career was not off to an auspicious start. Worse, no one knew how to pronounce his name! On the radio or television the announcers might say "you-KNEE-tus" or "YOU-neh-tus". Even as late as 1958, when Random House publisher Bennett Cerf was on a nationally broadcast television show, he pronounced John's name as "you-nih-TASS"!
But as all know, the Ball Bounces Back in Baltimore. For one thing the announcers finally got John's name right. It's "you-NYE-tus". Then in 1957 John led the team to a winning season of 7-5-0. Better still, the next year they went 9-3-0 and were the leaders of their division and slated to play the New York Giants in the NFL Championship.
The 1958 NFL Championship Game was played in Yankee Stadium and has been touted as
The Greatest
Even today a lot of connoisseurs agree with that assessment. But even those who believe later games supplanted the claim, you can at least say that it was the
The Greatest
Point
But it is this game that has been cited as the point where professional football finally emerged from the shadows. Before then most people wouldn't even recognize an NFL player if they saw one. In 1956 - the year John moved to Baltimore - Frank Gifford was the star NFL halfback for the New York Giants and had been voted the Most Valuable Player in the Championship. After the game, he appeared as a contestant on the celebrity panel quiz show What's My Line?.
And no one recognized him! And the panelists were all from New York!
As for the 1958 Championship Game, Baltimore won, and for the next decade and a half Johnny Unitas was the quintessential quarterback in the NFL. When he finally retired in 1973 he was a legend. He was elected to the Football Hall of Fame in 1979.
But today's football curmudgeons look at John's statistics and snort. Huh! His overall completion rate was only 54.6 % and he's not even in the Top 20 for total passing yardage. True, he had 290 touchdown passes - respectable enough - but that's only #17 overall and he also had 253 interceptions which is a whopping 4.9%. In other words, 1 out of 20 of John's passes were caught by the other team!
And the curmudgeons add, look at John's most famous record. That was his throwing at least one touchdown pass in 47 successive games, a record that was touted as:
The Record
... and worthy to stand along Joe Dimaggio's streak of 56 games with at least one hit.
But of course John's streak has been broken since then - not once, not twice, but three times!1
Footnote
There are some who think Joe did not really get the 56 game streak due to mistakes made by the umpires. In two games, Joe got on base but with plays that could have been - some say should have been - ruled errors on the part of the fielder. If you get on base due to an error, the plays are not normally counted as hits. Some people think it is possible the official scorer - who like everyone else was hoping Joe would keep going - had unconsciously favored Joe.
There was also one game where Joe had no hits and the last inning was in progress. The Yanks only needed one run to close out the game. The batter realized if he belted in a double - which was possible - Joe would not get his chance to bat and his streak (which was 44 games) would be over. Could he bunt, the batter asked the coach, and the coach said yes. He bunted, got on base, and then Joe came up and smacked in a run to keep the streak going.
Would Joe have gotten a hit without the decision to bunt? Who knows? But it did give Joe a chance to keep the streak going.
It's also worth remembering that Joe's 56 game streak was in the majors. In 1933, while still in the minors, Joe hit in 61 consecutive games. But that was for the #2 spot behind Joe Wilhoit who had a streak of 69 games playing for the Wichita Jobbers in 1919.
NOT, the curmudgeons sneer, what we expect for one of the greatest quarterbacks of all time.
Naturally John's fans wax wroth. All this brouaha, they say, is comparing apples and oranges. Football has changed a lot in the nearly 70 years since John threw his first pass. It's absolutely meaningless to make historical comparisons based on statistics, particularly using statistics that didn't even exist when John played the game!
How to rate a quarterback has been a bedeviling question since the first days of gridiron football. So in 1973, the last year that John played, the NFL came up with a "statistic" ("metric" is the world now used) to calculate how good a quarterback is. That is his "passing rating" which as you may guess tries to rate a quarterback's overall passing ability and with the rationale that the best passer will also be the best overall quarterback.
Now far be it for a layman to forget his "place" and comment on a statistic that has been invented by experts. Heaven forfend! But let's look at what this now ubiquitous quarterback passing rating actually tells us.
First of all, how do you calculate this "rating"? We'd really like to know that.
I thought you would as Captain Mephisto said to Sidney Brand. It's very simple really.
First you list the following measures of a quarterback's proficiency.
| Attempts | Total Passes Thrown by the Quarterback |
| Completions | Passes Thrown That Were Caught by a Teammate |
| Yards | Total Yards Achieved by Passing |
| Touchdowns | Passes That Resulted in a Touchdown |
| Interceptions | Passes Thrown That Were Caught by an Opposing Team Member |
... and abbreviate the terms as:
A | = | Attempts |
C | = | Completions |
Y | = | Yards |
T | = | Touchdowns |
I | = | Interceptions |
... and take the numbers - whether spanning a quarter, a full game, a entire season, or his entire career - and plug them into the following formula:
Passing Rating | = |
([(C/A - 0.3) × 5] |
There's another part of the formula in that the individual sections of the equation that are in brackets ([...]) cannot exceed 23/8. So if for instance
[(Completions/Attempts - 0.3) × 5] > 23/8
... then you set it equal to 23/8. Applying this restriction to all four parts of the summation ensures that the total passing rating can never be greater than
(4 × 23/8 ÷ 6) × 100 = 475/3
... which is approximately 158.3
It didn't take long for students of the game to raise some questions about this formula. Not only is the upper limit an arbitrary restraint but there are also questions about the usefulness of the numbers the equation produces. For instance a quarterback who attempts 1 throw from the 1 yard line and makes the touchdown and throws no other passes in the game will have a passing rating of 110. But a quarterback who throws 30 passes, completes 25, makes 200 yards, and makes two touchdowns, and has no interceptions has a lower rating - 104.
But the biggest problem of rating historical quarterbacks with a modern and admittedly somewhat contrived statistic is that today's quarterbacks throw the ball far more frequently than they did in John's time. And we mean FAR more frequently. It wasn't unusual for John to only attempt maybe 15-25 passes per game - we're talking maybe six passes per quarter.
But now you'll have quarterbacks throwing more than 60 passes in a game for heaven's sake! Since 1970, 45 quarterbacks - count 'em, 45 - have tossed at least that number in at least one game. Before 1970, only two quarterbacks ever attempted such a feat.
So just by the sheer numbers alone, you'll have quarterbacks breaking the old records!
As far as the touchdown-passing streak - John's tossing for touchdowns in 47 consecutive games - was a record that held for over half a century. And yes, every quarterback to pass John's record since then - that's EVERY quarterback - threw many more passes than John did in the seasons that spanned the streak. One quarterback even tripled the throws compared to John!
Joe Willie Namath
50/50.
John is by no means the only quarterback to whom the passing rating has given short shrift. After all, take a look at Joseph William Namath of the New York Jets. Joe was considered one of the top quarterbacks of the 1960's and even into the 70's. And yet Joe Willie had a paltry 50.1 % completion rate - yes, just 50/50 - and an abysmal passing rating of 65.5!
More astonishingly, he had only 173 touchdown passes and - get this - 220 interceptions. Yes, "Broadway Joe" had more interceptions than touchdown passes, for crying out loud!
The point is that despite his rotten passing rating and missing every other throw, Joe Namath was considered a top-notch passer and his quarterbacking landed him in the Football Hall of Fame!
As a further delving into the passing rating as a measure of skill, we'll look at some quarterbacks that have been considered the best and compare them to three quarterbacks that were ...
Well, let's just say we'll compare some great quarterbacks to those who did not quite achieve greatness. Courtesy prevents the listing of the names.
And if we list the quarterbacks from the higher passing rating on down we get:
| Still Playing Often Called the Best of All Time. | ||
| Great Player in College But Not Very Successful in the NFL | ||
| Retired But Some Experts Rate Him the Best in History | ||
| Also Great in College But A BIG Bust in the Pros. | ||
| A Legend in his Own Time and in the Hall of Fame | ||
| Considered One of the Best in His Era - Superbowl Winner and in the Hall of Fame |
||
| Quarterback #5 | 19 | Heisman Trophy Winner But Only Played 24 Games Over Six Years in the Pros |
Except for the two extreme points, it's hard to see that the passing rating has much to do with how good the quarterback is. After all one of the biggest busts in the NFL actually ranks higher than Johnny Unitas! Ain't no one would say that's an accurate assessment of ability.
From what we've seen we can understand if some think that the passing rating is largely horse hockey, balderdash, and bullshine. Certainly it's hard to tell if a rating is telling us that the quarterback has a rubber arm or that his receivers have butterfingers.
So to remedy the apparent deficiencies of the system, after the turn of the Millennium a new formula was invented which was intended to incorporate all the characteristics of a great quarterback into one statistic. This new metric incorporates the passing rates, success of running plays, how well the quarterback scrambles, the turnovers he makes, how far the individual passes travel, how often he's sacked, the penalties incurred, the strength of the opponents, home field advantage.
Among other things, of course.
One particular drawback in using such a "Generalized Quarterback Rating" is that the manner in how it's calculated is a well guarded secret. So when you get down to it there's not a lot of people who know what a good quarterback actually is.
But there's also problems with the actual number that's generated. There was once a quarterback who played half a game and did so bad that the coach benched him and sent in the back-up for the second half. But the opposing quarterback - who stayed in the game both halves AND actually won the game - had a lower quarterback rating!2
Footnote
More passes by no means equate to better football. On October 18th, 1970, the Baltimore Colts and the New York Jets were playing in Shea Stadium in New York.
Johnny was quarterback for the Colts and threw 24 times and completed 12 for 207 yards and 1 touchdown pass. Joe Namath was leading the Jets and he attempted 62 passes and completed 34 for 397 yards with 1 touchdown pass.
The Jets lost 22-29.
In this case, though, John's passing rating was 76.2 and despite his Herculean hurling, Joe's was a lowly 40.2. Of course, Joe's six interceptions brought his numbers way down. But even if Joe had only 1 interception, his rating would still have been only 73.1 - three points below John.
So what to do?
Well, let's take some advice from Henry David Thoreau: Simplify! Simplify! After all when you get down to it, what really matters is who won the game. And since the quarterback is the team leader, the better quarterback should have the more wins.
And what happens if you take rank the quarterbacks listed above by their winning percentage? That is, by the percent of the games that they won?
Do that and suddenly things make a lot more sense.
| 71% | Quarterback #3 | 76 | Retired But Some Experts Rate Him the Best in History |
| 70% | Quarterback #1 | 88 | Still Playing Often Called the Best of All Time. |
| 64% | Johnny Unitas | 71 | A Legend in his Own Time and in the Hall of Fame |
| 49% | Joe Willie Namath | 65 | Considered One of the Best in His Era - Superbowl Winner and in the Hall of Fame |
| 39% | Quarterback #2 | 84 | Great Player in College But Not Very Successful in the NFL |
| 33% | Quarterback #4 | 84 | Also Great in College But A BIG Bust in the Pros. |
| 0% | Quarterback #5 | 19 | Heisman Trophy Winner But Only Played 24 Games Over Six Years in the Pros |
So we see that John actually shakes out pretty good. Of course, today's players also benefit from improved sports medicine and methods of training, not to mention the public's insatiable appetite where if some sports is good, more is better, and too much is just enough. With more passing, longer careers, longer seasons, more games per season, and more teams in the league, naturally the statistical markers will go up.
But there's one more "statistic" that is most important in today's sports world. And it is never factored in with how good a players is.
And that's
The
MOOLAH
... as the true measure of the quarterbacks value to the team. So all the "metrics" need to be calculated as a ratio with the money the team has to shuck out.
For instance try rating quarterbacks by passing yardage per dollar. In 1956 Johnny Unitas made $70003 and threw for 1498 yards. So the team had to pay John at less than $5 per yard.
Footnote
A surprisingly authoritative reference says John's first salary at Baltimore was $17,000. However, one writer found the contract and published it in facsimile. The amount for the year was clearly stated as $7000 and John wouldn't get a penny unless he made the team. If so, then he'd get $437 per game and the rest of his salary - $1756 - ONLY if he finished out the season.
Of course, John's pay went up. But even at his highest salary in Baltimore, John was playing for only a bit more that $100 per yard. Certainly during his career, John's value to the team was high.
But go back to the tables and pick one of the other quarterbacks. There's one season where the team would ultimately pay him $35,000 per yard - or a thousandth of an inch per dollar - and the team still ended up 3-13-0.
We'll take Big John.
References
Johnny Unitas: The Best There Ever Was, Roland Lazenby, Triumph Books, 2002.
"A Football Team That Wanted Him: Johnny Unitas and the Bloomfield Rams", Paul Sciullo, Pittsburgh Orbit, October 15, 2017.
"Prices of 1955", Fifites Web.
"The Streak That Changed Football", Sports Illustrated, December 10, 2010.
"Johnny Unitas (1933-2002)", Pittsburgh in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania - The American Northeast (Mid-Atlantic), Mike Wintermantel, The Historical Marker Data Base, March 14, 2011.
"Johnny Unitas’s 1956 Colts Contract", Mark Mravic, Sports Illustrated, July 15, 2014.
"Today's QBs Are Beyond Comparison", ESPN, Kevin Seifert, December 17, 2014.
"The Best Team You Ever Saw", Sports Illustrated, January 4, 1960.
"Johnny U – Baltimore’s Most Important Player", Jim Johnson, Baltimore Sports and Life, September 14, 2021.
"How is Total QBR calculated?", Brian Burke, Entertainment and Sports Programming Network, September 27, 2016.
"Top 25 Quarterbacks of All Time", Elliot Harrison, NFL July 2, 2019.
"Top 15 Elite College Quarterbacks Who Were Busts In The NFL", The Sportster, June 7, 2017.
What's My Line?, John Daly (host), Frank Gifford (guest), Milton Berle (mystery guest), Bennett Cerf (panelist), Arlene Francis (panelist), Dorothy Kilgallen (guest), Stubby Kaye (panelist), CBS, December 2, 1956.
"Johnny Unitas", Pro Football Reference.
"Baltimore Colts", Pro Football Reference.
"[Quarterbacks X,Y,Z]", Pro Football Reference.
"NFL Pass Attempts Single Game Leaders", Pro Football Reference.
"Baltimore Colts at New York Jets - October 18th, 1970", Pro Football Reference.