The Ultimate Winner

Here's the thing about scouting college football players for the NFL draft. It's based on fear. Scouts cover their tracks. They hedge their bets. Their evaluations all read, "Yes..., but...." Yes, he can move the team down the field, but he doesn't have an NFL arm. If the player makes it, the scout will say, "Well, I told you he had potential," or if he's a bust, the scout will shake his head and say, "See, the arm didn't hold up, just like I said."

There are more negatives than positives in most scouting reports. It's a wonder the teams can find enough people to play. Intangibles, the look scouts see in a player's eye or a certain feeling about him, are for late-night, third-drink talk at the hotel bar. Unless a scout feels very secure in his employment, he won't load up his reports with intangibles. It's too easy to be wrong. And that's what terrorizes the scouts—the fear of being wrong all by themselves, the big error, the No. 1 pick that was a total bust. And on draft day 1979, a lot of scouts were wrong about Joe Montana.

Eighty-one choices were made before the San Francisco 49ers took him near the end of the third round. A lot of teams made a mistake. Thinking back, what were the negatives on Montana when he was coming out of college? Strength of arm? Sure, he couldn't knock down buildings. So what? The Hall of Fame is filled with quarterbacks who didn't have a cannon. But there was something else, an undercurrent. He had trouble with his coach at Notre Dame. Uh-oh, look out. A warning light went off.

"Trouble, what trouble?" Montana says. "I mean, I was unhappy that I didn't start when I thought I should have, and I was pretty upset when I opened my junior year as third string, but I never openly challenged Dan Devine, or missed practices or stuff like that."

"It's always bothered me that people felt we didn't get along," says Devine, who's now out of football and living in Arizona. "At the time, I did things I had to do, and I tried to explain them to him, and I know it must have been hard for a kid to understand that."

If the scouts had talked to some of the Notre Dame players about Montana—teammates like Ken MacAfee, Dave Huffman and Dave Waymer—they might have gotten a different picture of the quarterback, not so much by what the players said but by the way they said it. There was a belief, almost mystical, among Montana's teammates that as long as Joe was on the field things would turn out right, no matter what the score was. Didn't he bring them back from 20 points down in the fourth quarter at Air Force, and from 22 down against Houston with 7:37 to play in the Cotton Bowl? Cool, unshakable, treats a bowl game the same as a practice. "The guys on the team knew who wouldn't overheat," was the way Waymer put it.

Look at the little decisions that might have changed the course of history. What if, for instance, the Pittsburgh Steelers had decided that neither Mike Kruczek nor Cliff Stoudt were the eventual successors to then 30-year-old Terry Bradshaw, and the team had drafted Montana? Instead of four Super Bowl victories by 1980, would the Steelers have gone on to win five? Six? Seven? Who knows?

Actually, there was a solid corps of quarterbacks in the NFL at the time of the '79 draft; only three teams had a crying need for one. In the first round, the New York Giants selected Phil Simms of Morehead State, which was not much of a surprise; Giants coach Ray Perkins had worked out Simms himself. Later in the first round, the Kansas City Chiefs took Clemson's Steve Fuller, whom Montana had outdueled as a junior in one of his six classic come-from-behind victories at Notre Dame. Fuller was 6'4", with a mighty arm; a safe pick. As for the Chicago Bears, they knew they weren't going to a Super Bowl with Bob Avellini or Mike Phipps at quarterback, and Vince Evans was a long shot. For a while the Bears were very close to drafting Montana.

"Notre Dame is right down the road, and my wife and children loved Joe Montana," Bears player personnel director Bill Tobin says. "When I left the house, I told them, 'If he's there on the third round, he's ours.' "

But while Tobin was in the draft room, things changed. Montana was there when the Bears picked in the third round, but the team took Willie McClendon, a running back out of Georgia. "I had a lot of explaining to do to three young kids and my wife," Tobin says. "But who knows, if he came here, that he would have had the career that he's had in San Francisco? That's true of any player."