Bryan Bartlett Starr (and Bill Buckner)

This obituary for Bart Starr is very good:

Starr’s name may have been the most flamboyant thing about him. But he proved to be skilled, sly and, by at least one measure, incomparably successful: He won three N.F.L. championships (for the seasons played in 1961, ’62 and ’65) in the pre-Super Bowl era, and then the first two Super Bowls, in January of 1967 and ’68. That Packers’ run of N.F.L. championships helped bring new attention to professional football as it moved into the Super Bowl era. (With his victory in 2019, Tom Brady has won six Super Bowls with the New England Patriots.)

Starr was named the league’s most valuable player in 1966 and received the same honor in Super Bowls I and II. He was selected to the Pro Bowl four times. And on a team known for running — with the flashy Paul Hornung and the rugged Jim Taylor (who died in October)— Starr was one of the league’s most efficient passers. He led the N.F.L. in that crucial category in three seasons and, on average, for all of the 1960s — even though his rival Johnny Unitas of the Baltimore Colts was often viewed as better. Starr set career records for completion percentage, 57.4, and consecutive passes without an interception, 294.

Those records were eventually broken in a league transformed by precision-passing offenses and increasingly coddled quarterbacks, many groomed since childhood and arriving at the annual N.F.L. draft as celebrities. Starr, by contrast, was drafted in the 17th round in 1956 after barely playing his senior year at Alabama, and he may not have been the most talented player on the Packers during their glory years. Many teammates from that era — including Hornung, Taylor, Willie Davis, Forrest Gregg, Jerry Kramer and Ray Nitschke — are in the Hall of Fame. (Gregg died in April.)

Yet Starr became the Packers’ most essential player. Lombardi was a new kind of coach — comprehensive, obsessive, relentless — and he needed a new kind of quarterback, serious and studious enough to put the coach’s grand plans into motion, to make crucial decisions when the game, and maybe the season, was on the line, and to endure Lombardi’s sometimes harsh criticism. Starr became a passionate student and a superlative field general, and he never stopped giving Lombardi credit for his success.

I’ve mentioned this before, but Starr is if anything underrated. Unitas is the one QB from that era who generally gets mentioned in greatest-ever discussions, but there’s a very strong case that Starr was better. As the obit alludes to, part of this perception of Starr as a great leader/effective game manager rather than the all-time-great-period he in fact was is that the first great Lombardi teams were run-it-down-your-throat teams. But by the time of the first Super Bowl team, the Packers running game was flat-out bad — a 31-year-old Jim Taylor got 3.5 Y/C and Elijah Pitts was even worse. They were dominant because Starr thew for 9 Y/A with only 3 picks in in 251 attempts, phenomenal production for 1966. (Making no era adjustments, that’s a higher Y/A and much better INT% than Patrick Mahomes in 2018. Think about that.) And he has a strong case for the being the best postseason QB ever, Montana and Brady included.

In addition, Bill Buckner died today. His status as the goat of Game 6 was always grossly unfair — his legendarily incompetent manager shouldn’t have had him on the field in the first place, and the game was tied and Boston out of credible pitchers before the E-3 — and fortunately this became the conventional wisdom. (The Red Sox bringing him in to throw out the first pitch in 2008 was phenomenal). He wasn’t a great player but he handled becoming a symbol with far more class than could be reasonably expected, and getting his own Curb Your Enthusiasm storyline was a nice reward. R.I.P to two athletes who were legends in their own way.