I recently happened upon a book written by former Minnesota Vikings quarterback Fran Tarkenton. It’s a book that I never knew existed. Perhaps I didn’t know that it existed because he wrote it during his five-year sabbatical with the New York Giants. Better Scramble Than Lose is a tiny book, 156 pages. It feels smaller as it can be easily slipped into a back pocket. I might’ve zipped through this little treasure if I hadn’t been stopped by the close of Chapter 1. In 1969, Fran Tarkenton saw the future of football.
I think that the quarterback of tomorrow will be better than we are today, and he’ll be able to do a zillion things, including scrambling. He’s going to have the ability to throw from the roll, the moving pocket, the dropback pocket, the bootleg, and the busted play. What you’re seeing now is the turnover period. When the present crop of pro quarterbacks goes out (and many of them are already over 30), the new group will make us old-timers look silly. The quarterbacks coming out of college nowadays are better athletes than ever before: They can do everything. They’re just not producing any more of those stay-in-the-pocket, rocking-chair quarterbacks. The new breed will make the game of football wilder and more interesting than ever before. You’ll see a mobile, unstereotyped game, a fluid, intellectual, complex game, sort of like chess with a crunch. You’ll see more rollouts, more bootlegs, more scrambles, more moving pockets, more play-action passes, more multiple formations — not only the flanker formation or flanker with split ends, but the double and triple wing, with three flankers to one side, or the wing double wing, or maybe variations of the shotgun. There will be all kinds of offenses and they will all be used by the same team in the same game.
I discovered and became a fan of football in the 1970s. By today’s nomenclature, every offense was in some variation of a 21, two running backs and one tight end. That left two receivers split wide. I was just a naive little kid, a football newbie. I never thought then that I’d ever see an offense with fewer than two running backs and more than two wideouts. Talented passers with thunderbolt arms like Dan Marino and John Elway would soon change that thinking. New rules made it so easy to throw the football that it would be foolish not to put more pass-catchers on the field. I saw it as it was taking place in the 1980s. Tarkenton saw it all from the 1960s. No wonder he did so well in business.
As for the more athletic quarterbacks that Tarkenton predicted, that took a little longer. Sure, there were some very mobile quarterbacks like Roger Staubach and Archie Manning that established themselves in the 1970s. I think that Randall Cunningham and Steve Young were the first of the NFL’s true dual-threat passers. They could run like a running back and throw like, well, a quarterback. Defenses didn’t just have to contend with Young and Cunningham’s ability to extend plays, like Tarkenton and Staubach before them. Defenses had to contend with Young and Cunningham gutting them with their feet. Young’s 49-yard ramble through the Vikings defense still wakes me from sound sleeps. The number of quarterbacks that can rip open a game throwing or running have only increased over the past decade.
Tarkenton’s football foresight was remarkable. As for his little book, the first chapter of Better Scramble Than Lose reveals a joking, even whimsical, Tarkenton. I was surprised by his lively prose. It’s not that I didn’t think that he had a fun side. After all, he did host Saturday Night Live. I look forward to the remaining chapters of his little book.
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