Heirs To U

On Dec. 28, 2001, New York Giants general manager Ernie Accorsi made the call that he made every year on the anniversary of the Baltimore Colts' 1958 NFL Championship Game victory--to John Unitas, the mastermind of that historic win. "You know what today is, don't you?" Accorsi asked. Unitas knew. He always knew. And that day, Unitas, who watched football every Sunday, went on a rant.

"I could never play the way these quarterbacks play today," he said. "I could never play like a robot. That's what these guys are--robots."

"John," Accorsi said, "you wouldn't have a choice."

"Then I wouldn't play," Unitas replied.

Accorsi grew up a Colts fan and in 1970 became the team's p.r. man. He and Unitas remained good friends until the quarterback's death in September 2002. "I'll never forget that conversation because it was the last great football conversation we had," Accorsi said last Friday. "He was adamant that the quarterback should run the game. He felt the quarterback was the guy who had the game in his hands, and it shouldn't be run by coaches on the sidelines."

Accorsi recalls an anecdote from 1964, Don Shula's second year as Colts coach. Shula sent backup wide receiver Alex Hawkins into a game with a play, but when Hawkins got to the huddle, Unitas asked him gruffly what he was doing there. Hawkins said Shula wanted to run a specific play, 65 Flare Outcut. Unitas called a timeout and walked to the sideline. "You want to run that play?" he said to Shula. "You go in and run it." Battle won. Unitas called a play he wanted.

Asked which of today's quarterbacks remind him of Unitas, Accorsi thought for a while. " Troy Aikman did," he said of the Dallas Cowboys' three-time Super Bowl champ who retired in 2001. "He had the same personality on the field: cold-blooded, steely. He won a Super Bowl with a concussion, which is something Unitas would have done. Other than that ... well, maybe [the New England Patriots'] Tom Brady. Their stories are similar--late draft choices, backups early, really smart. But that's it."

The advent of situation substitution on both sides of the ball in the late 1970s has made calling plays as Unitas did nearly impossible. Except in some two-minute drills, the last quarterback to even have the opportunity was Jim Kelly, who ran the Buffalo Bills' offense a decade ago. While one of today's passers would be formulating the next play in his head, a new package of players--his own and and the defense's--would be running onto the field.

Accorsi thinks the NFL was better when it was a matchup game of 11 men against 11 for an entire series, not a scheme game with coaches on the sideline and high in the stadium boxes controlling the action. "They say everything is cyclical, and I hope I live to see the return of that kind of football," Accorsi said. "But I doubt it. It's like in baseball--with the pitch count, you're not going to see pitchers throw like they used to. Same thing in football. This is the generation we raised. This is the game today."