Well done, Doc. It's hard for people to grasp that which they have never seen. If fact, it's hard for them to WANT to do so. Young people cannot grasp the underlying angst of the Cold War. Tell 'em that you used to have nuclear war drills at school where when the alarm sounded everybody scooted under their desks, ducked their head, and covered the back of their neck with hands clasped. My generation was not immune from this. As kids ourselves we heard STORIES about the Great Depression, but we could never understand truly the immense affect it had on the psyche of our parents and grandparents. When they told us how they used to walk a mile or two through the snow to get to school each day we rolled our eyes. To us it was irrelevant, a fantasy land from a past we never ourselves experienced.
All sports were so different back then. Same basic rules, but vastly different. Very little in the way of statistics was cheap back then. But baseball stats can never be viewed the same since the steroid era. Passing stats in football are forever different since the West Coast offense came along. Basketball has been affected too since the showtime Lakers.
This is not a nostalgic "those were the good ol' days" - "these are the bad new days" comment. It's just a recognition of the human condition. My son cannot possibly understand how my father viewed the student protests of the late '60's. My daughters cannot understand how Dick Van Dyke treats his wife like a Barbie doll in his TV show.
=== Don't Know What This Has To Do With Anything, But Just Thought I'd Mention It ===
Sports-surfin', we ran across a title promising to bring us up to speed on .... "Most Overrated QB's Of All Time."
Sounds interesting, but it got a lot more interesting when we cracked it open and found it stuffed with guys like Johnny Unitas, Bart Starr and Fran Tarkenton ... the card-heroes I used to play Strat-O with.
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9th-most OVERrated quarterback who ever lived: Johnny Unitas. :akdru;lizdx87zpdco89drqjfpim;k:
Rudnansky's rationale, thusly:
Johnny Unitas is one of the most celebrated football players ever, with a ridiculous 10 Pro Bowl selections and an induction into the Hall of Fame.
But a 78.2 QB rating certainly doesn't warrant this. Neither does a 4.9 percent interception rate or a completion percentage of 54.6 percent.
Which is very, VERY similar to reading that Dick Allen was overrated because he only hit .292 in the 1960's. :- )
We ralph'ed over to Pro Football Reference to see if we remembered Johnny U wrong. Wow! Maybe my memories were implanted and I'm only a week old. Could be... who, me? Couldn' Be!
Nope, couldn't be.
- 1964 Adjusted Yards Per Attempt
- Baltimore Colts - 8.9
- NFL Average - 6.0
There were three NFL teams above the 6's .... the Colts, Packers, and Vikings (Unitas, Starr and Tarkenton, all members of Rudnansky's top 10 alltime goober list).
And in 1964, Unitas was over the hill....
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It's not like you can't find a bunch of years when the NFL threw for 6 yards per pass, and Unitas threw for 8.
And not like Unitas doesn't "sabermetrically" (safermetrically?) show up huge: he's 10th in Approximate Value since 1950.
Worse, arguments against Joe Namath and Trent Dilfer, based on .500 W/L records, get suddenly tossed out the window when evaluating guys like Unitas (117-60 or something) and Starr.
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Hey, dude, you just weren't there. What you don't get, is what it looked like to watch Unitas throw for 33 touchdowns in a 12-game season, when the best QB other than Unitas threw for only 21.
Unitas threw the ball downfield, consistently hitting on long gains, at a time when other teams just didn't know how.
What would it look like, for Tom Brady to average 50% more yardage per pass attempt than the NFL, and to throw for more than twice as many TD's as the #15 guy?
Dunno. He's never done it.
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The Colts were the first modern NFL offense, and there were seasons they were virtually impossible to stop.
In 1958, for example, the Colts scored 381 points in 12 games, despite a cloud-of-dust era ... Lenny Moore ran for 7.3 yards per carry, caught passes for almost 1,000 more, and was considered about their 5th-best offensive player.
In 1959, the Colts did it all again, won their 2nd consecutive championship, which is what it's about, we suppose...
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Rudnansky's bio proudly proclaims him a hip young party-school socialite. If yer gonna write feature shtick for major websites, though, you might wanna remember: all a HOF'er can do, in his era, is take the game past where he found it.
As Ichiro is doing, albeit to a lesser extent than Johnny U did.
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It's a funny thing. In baseball, nobody today can ever hope to equal Johnny Bench or Stan Musial. But in the NFL and NBA, the greats of the 1960's are jokes, never to be compared to today's state-of-the-art. Can you explain that? :- )
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Cheerio,
Dr D
Comments
Overrater? Sheeesh! You're right, Doc. You HAD to be there!
Unitas kicked the snot out of the defenses of the day. Killed 'em. He basically invented the modern QB position.
Starr? Did he ever lose a big game? The guy threw the ball to the right guy at the right time and his teams won. Championships.
I've seen 5 or 6 QB 's that sepearate themselves from the rest of the pack...in my lots of years of watching.
Unitas, Starr, Staubach, Brady, Elway. Probably add Montana to that list....except that the 'Niners won just as well without him when Young took the helm...and I can't include both.
OK...I'll include Montana.
Manning, Marino, Favre....guys like that put up gawdy numbers....but didn't win multiple championships. To be an all-time great...you better do that.
After my list of 6...it gets debatable.
Tarkington? We forget how good he was. Not an all-time great, however. And certainly not overrated!
Take it for what it's worth.
moe
Since one cannot by definition directly experience that which he has not lived through, in order to best understand the past one must balance the views of now-current historians, whose persepective, though not totally unbiased, is at benefitted by distance from the unique biases and passions of the time they are writing about but also by heeding the lessons of the history since then, with the views of historians with less distance in time who have lived through the things they write about. These latter are in a unique position to help us so much as possible to understand the people of those time, even though there judgments cannot benefit fully from the lessons of intervening history.
If one wants to understand World War II, read contemporary historians to be sure, but also read the many excellent and revealing books produced in the 1950's. The modern historian can certainly document the flaws and foibles of Winston Churchill, for example, but can they truly convey his impact as the Defiant Bulldog who rallied England when she was humbled before Hitler and bombs were raining on her cities? Can they do so as well as the contemporaries?
Comment is better than the original post :- )
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We realize that Unitas wasn't inherently better than Peyton Manning, necessarily, but ... what if Peyton had to play before the West Coast was invented? What if he had to call his own plays?
What if his receivers were slow? What if he didn't have pictures of the secondary to review on the sideline between drives?
What if the field were muddy, for that matter? Today's NFL robo-QB's don't throw for 350 when the conditions are sloppy...
Street fighting is different from boxing, 3-on-3 streetball is different from the NBA, and Unitas simply played a different sport.
That's okay, until the kid from the 'Playboy Party School' informs Unitas that he just doesn't understand :- )
Starr? Did he ever lose a big game? The guy threw the ball to the right guy at the right time and his teams won. Championships.
Right... if a QB knew that throwing 12 passes would win a particular game, like Griese in one Super Bowl, do you dock him points for engineering a win? ...
I've seen 5 or 6 QB 's that sepearate themselves from the rest of the pack...in my lots of years of watching.
Unitas, Starr, Staubach, Brady, Elway. Probably add Montana to that list....except that the 'Niners won just as well without him when Young took the helm...and I can't include both.
Great point. Montana and Rice usually show up 1-2 as the NFL's best alltime, and I got no problemo wit dat.
But when the next QB steps in and your team is still great, that puts all kinds of perspective on the conditions the last guy had...
But under the SAME CONDITIONS, would that student devise the same experiments and discover the same things?
You're born into a different world, you're given a different SAT test. Greats of the previous eras scored just as well - maybe better :- ) - than greats of today's eras.
Check an 8th-grade scholastic test from 100 years ago...
Bill said, "I can't imagine why anybody cared if Elizabeth Taylor hopped down the street on one foot, unclothed."
"But I wasn't there."
That bit of humility was key to his understanding of players such as, e.g., Whitey Ford.
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Kids today think they can look at an 8x10 of Taylor and capture her...
Elizabeth Taylor's mystique and aura was relative to the screen stars who came just before her. 50 years from now, people will have no inkling how Lady GaGa could have ever been a star.
By the way, any list of the greatest QB's ever must include in the Top 10 Slingin' Sammy Baugh.
Heck, One year Baugh led the league in passing and in interceptions, IIRC. And I think he held the league record for punting for 5 or 6 decades.
The Unitas' and Starr's played in an era where defensive backs regularly mugged receivers at the line of scrimmage AND guys like Fuzzy Thurston and Jerry Kramer couldn't extend their arms when they blocked. Imagine pass blocking Carl Eller or Merlin Olson WITHOUT extending your arms.
Different game...but great is great.
Babe Ruth never hit against Mariano Rivera and other specialists. But nobody dominated the game with the bat like Ruth....ever. Ergo...he's one of the all-time greats! Maybe "The Great."
Lebron James, THE all-time great? Don't make me laugh!
Come to me when he's won a handful of championships.....then maybe he'll join the Russell, Jordan, Magic, Kareem......(followed by Wilt, West, Oscar, Hondo, Bird, McHale) group. But I don't see many quitters in that bunch.
Great is flat out great.
May and Aaron and Dimaggio and Mantle and Willie McCovey would still dominate today. Koufax would still throw BB's. Whitey Ford would still just get you out.
Even Felix would tremble a bit with a one out, one run lead in the ninth and The Babe at the plate.
Heck...He would probably call his shot.