Johnny Unitas

The sheer numbers Unitas achieved in his career are impressive, and in some cases even staggering. His lifetime completion percentage of over 55%, while extremely good, is not the greatest ever, but in light of the vast number of passes this represents—5,186, with 2,830 completions—this in itself is a stunning statistic. So, too, is the number of yards these passes gained for the Colts: 40,239, an NFL record at the time.

Unitas also achieved a number of other distinctions that were NFL records at the time of his retirement: most seasons passing for more than 3,000 yards (3); most games passing for 300 yards or more (27); most touchdowns thrown (290); highest post-season pass completion percentage (62.9%); and most yards gained passing during championship play (1,177).

Among the greatest of modern football's founding fathers, Unitas's career marked a high point between that of such early pioneers as Red Grange and the advent of the "hot shot," exemplified by Namath. In a world that has come to be characterized, all too often, by prima donnas, Unitas was as no-nonsense as his hairstyle, and he excelled at calling his own plays, something modern quarterbacks cannot do. The game has become too complicated today for any one quarterback to call all his own plays, and ironically, Unitas, by helping to inaugurate the modern era with that historic game in 1958, paved the way for the more complex game that came into being.