[Gotham Dark Knight]

There are 19 days left until the Bills open their training camp at St. John Fisher College near Rochester and begin to sort out the identity of their starting quarterback.


That's not such a long wait when you consider that it's been 10 years that they have been looking for a reasonable facsimile of, much less a successor to, Jim Kelly.

Doug Flutie provided us with one entertaining season and Drew Bledsoe one half of a dynamite season during the wait for another Kelly.
For many pro football teams the pause between great quarterbacks can seem like an eternity.

Take Otto Graham and the Cleveland Browns.
For my money Graham ranks as one of the four greatest quarterbacks of all time with Joe Montana of San Francisco, Johnny Unitas of the Baltimore Colts and Brett Favre of Green Bay. Sammy Baugh, who starred for the pre-World War II Washington Redskins, probably belongs in that group but I never saw him play.

When Graham played for the Browns, victory was a constant companion. The Browns began in the All-America Conference, created to challenge the NFL, in 1946. Cleveland dominated the AAFC, winning the championship in all four years of its existence. When the AAFC was swallowed by the NFL in 1950, the Browns were pitted against the NFL champions, the Philadelphia Eagles, in their first game.
The Browns, with Graham at the controls, won, 35-10, right in Philly and went on to win the NFL championship. In fact they played in the next five NFL title games and won two more of them.
In his final game before retirement, Graham, still the league's leading passer, led the Browns to a 38-14 victory over the Los Angeles Rams for the 1955 championship.
In all, Graham played in a league championship game every season of his career.

The year after Graham retired, the Browns suffered their first losing season and their scoring dropped from 349 points to 167. From 1956 to 1965 when the great Jim Brown powered the Browns' ground attack, Cleveland won just a single title, in 1964.

There have been 40 Super Bowls since but no Cleveland team ever appeared in one.

Something similar happened to the Detroit Lions, another of the elite franchises when the NFL was a 12-team league.
With the swashbuckling Bobby Layne at quarterback in the mid-'50s the Lions won two NFL championships. The Lions were the Raiders before there were any Raiders and Layne led them in the Detroit night spots, too. Yet two games into the 1958 season Detroit foolishly traded Layne to Pittsburgh and the Lions haven't won a title nor appeared in a Super Bowl since.

The Lions have spent 48 years trying to find Layne's successor and last season they discovered it wasn't Joey Harrington.
There are cases of more recent vintage.

Jets fans pine for another Joe Namath, who, incidentally, never won another playoff game after directing New York, huge underdogs, to the upset of all upsets over Baltimore in Super Bowl III.

Some teams have gotten lucky, none luckier than the San Francisco 49ers, who had Steve Young immediately follow Montana as a Hall of Famer.

There was another Hall of Fame 49er quarterback before them, Y.A. Tittle in the '50s. Squeezed into that archive were two quarterbacks in the "very good" category - Frankie Albert on the first 49er teams and much later John Brodie.

In Miami, after a short pause Bob Griese was followed by Dan Marino. Pittsburgh had to wait much longer after Terry Bradshaw retired, but if Ben Roethlisberger keeps himself in one piece the potential is there for greatness. When the Bills break camp in Rochester none of their quarterbacks is likely to bear the look of Kelly, but would it be too much to ask for another Joe Ferguson, Jack Kemp or Daryle Lamonica?



Okay so asking for another Jim Kelly out of these guys is a stretch...What about another Ferguson or Kemp (I associate Lamonica with the Raiders)...what's the upside on what they have?...And why didn't they go for a QB in the draft?

[Lefty Noob]

And why didn't they go for a QB in the draft?

That's the million dollar question right there, isn't it? John McCargo... <shaking head>