Then when your wrong your wrong...lol...I have to bow down to champ for the first time in a couple years. Havent watched the game in a long time...my mind for some reason just remembered the 30 rushes by Snell and although not dominating...they did beat them up on the ground in that last quarter. Thanks staff for straightening that out..in a very nice and fair way.
See....I love that response champ...no gloating...I have always been a closet fan of yours...even a defender at times. Kudos on this one.
You have to understand the game was completely different then. QB's called their own plays, it wasn't a game of check-off passes and dumps and 65% completion percentage. With absolutely no mobility, he made incredibly quick reads and could dissect a defense in a flash. His greatest weakness, other than his knees, was that, due to the strength of his arm, he believed he could complete any pass, even between 5 defenders. And, as has been mentioned elsewhere, his performance in the 68 championship game was utterly extraordinary. While his statistics don't measure up, his performance was stunning. While everyone focuses on the 68 season, it's worth looking at some films from the early 70's, when they had lousy teams and stayed in games they had no business being in other than the fact that Namath single-handedly made them competitive. I don't think he was overrated at all.
1960s decade leaders, completion percentage (minimum 1500 attempts) NFL Bart Starr, 58.9 Sonny Jurgensen, 56.4 Johnny Unitas, 55.3 AFL Len Dawson, 56.8 Joe Namath, 50.2 John Hadl, 49.3 These numbers indicate it was harder to complete passes back then. Jurgensen is widely considered the best pure passer of all time and was considered highly accurate, but that 56.4 number would be mediocre today.
I've never seen these numbers before, and they absolutely show what we oldtimers have been saying. Namath inaccurate? Then how did he have the second highest completion percentage for the decade in the AFL? And, if you compare him to Dawson, you can see that he passed far more than Dawson ever did (Dawson never broke 3000 yards passing in his career; Namath did it three times, and was the first person to break 4000, and this was in a 14 game season; nobody broke 4000 again until Dan Fouts 13 years later). If this doesn't settle the ridiculous "Namath was overrated" question once and for all (at least on this board), then nothing will.
Namath's stats in the 1968 AFL Championship Game: 19 of 49 for 266 yards, 3 touchdowns, 1 interception He was the consensus AFL player of the year in 1968 and only completed 49.2% of his passes.
Len Dawson was a dink & dunk guy way before it came into fashion. Hadl & JWN were far more bombs away QBs then LD was.
Wow, I knew the completion percentage wasn't as high back then (since DB's got away with a lot more), but damn I didn't realize it was that extreme. To prove the point of how extreme it has gotten, of the 34 QB's who had enough attempts to qualify in 2005, 22 had a higher completion % than Starr. Only 1 (J.P. Losman) had a percentage worse than Namath.
