Remembering Sonny Jurgensen

This scene left an indelible image in the memory of Washington Redskins fans of a certain age. The pocket is collapsing on the Skins quarterback. He’s about to be hit. He doesn’t look athletic enough to escape.

Then, suddenly, with an improbably quick release, the ball is out of his hands heading with precision like a dart to a wide receiver who is barely open. The receiver might be Bobby Mitchell, Angelo Coia, or Preston Carpenter. A few years later, it would be Charley Taylor, Jerry Smith, or Roy Jefferson. In any case, it’s first-down Redskins.

The game might end in a 34-31 defeat or maybe a win by the same score. Either way, Redskins fans have been treated to a command performance by their QB. For them, Skins games have become must-see.

The QB, of course, was Sonny Jurgensen, who died last week at the age of 91.

Jurgensen, at 5-11 at a paunchy 200+ pounds, didn’t look like much like an athlete, but he was. It wasn’t that Jurgenson couldn’t scramble out of the pocket. It was that with that quick releases and the ability to throw from any arm angle, he refused, as he put it, to allow defenses to force him away from his primary skill (passing) and into a secondary skill (running).

Jurgensen’s athletic credentials were stellar. An all-state high school basketball player in North Carolina, he went on to play quarterback and defensive back at Duke, where he was also an Academic All American.

Because Duke had a conservative, run-oriented offense, Jurgensen was as well known in college for his excellent defense as for his quarterbacking. In fact, at Duke the number of passes he intercepted on defense exceeded the number of touchdown passes he threw on offense.

But the Philadelphia Eagles drafted him as quarterback in the fourth round and Jurgensen became the backup for future Hall of Famer, Norm Van Brocklin. When Van Brocklin retired after leading the Eagles to the NFL championship in 1960, it was finally Jurgensen’s time.

And what a time it was. In 1961, Jurgensen made first-team all-pro, ahead of Johnny Unitas and Bart Starr. That year, he set the NFL record for most passing yards in a single season. His 32 touchdown passes set the Eagles record that wasn’t surpassed until Carson Wentz threw for 33 touchdowns 56 years later. (Jurgensen still holds the Redskins single-season touchdown record.) By Wentz’s time, the league had become pass-happy and the rules had been altered to favor quarterbacks and receivers.

Jurgensen was popular in Philadelphia, as Bill can attest. But he wasn’t popular with management. It wasn’t just his partying that grated. One year, Sonny convinced his backup QB, King Hill, to walk out of training camp in a quest for more money. Jurgensen’s days as an Eagle were numbered.

Then, in one of the worst trades in NFL history, the Eagles swapped quarterbacks with the Redskins. We sent them Norm Snead and a hapless cornerback named Claude Crabb (who later became a decent special teams player) in exchange for Jurgensen.

I was resting in bed with a bad headache when I heard the news. Instantly, the headache was gone. For Bill and his fellow Eagles fans, it was just beginning.

Philadelphia night life also took a hit. Jurgensen quipped that “when I left Philadelphia, all the bartenders wore black armbands.”

In Washington, Jurgensen would become the city’s most revered and iconic sports hero since Walter Johnson, who died in 1946. Johnson was a baseball pitcher and Washington had been a baseball town, though that was starting to change in the early 1960s.

With Jurgensen’s arrival, Washington became a football town. It has remained so ever since despite several recent decades of poor play.

Jurgensen made the Pro Bowl in three of his first four seasons in D.C. In two of them, he led the NFL in passing yardage. This despite playing behind a poor-to-mediocre offensive line and, at first, with a receiving corps in which Bobby Mitchell was the only serious threat.

By 1967, Mitchell had been joined by Charley Taylor and Jerry Smith. That year, Jurgensen broke the NFL passing-yardage record he had set in 1961, led the league in touchdown passes, had the league’s lowest interception rate, and its highest passer rating. Taylor, Smith, and Mitchell (60) finished first, second and fourth in the league in receptions that season.

Tributes to Jurgensen have called him the purest passer of his generation, and he was — a true gunslinger, perhaps the first in a league where conservative, run-first offenses were the norm. I think of him as the first in a line of quarterbacks that includes Joe Namath, Dan Marino, and Brett Favre. In today’s terms, think of Aaron Rodgers but with a sunny disposition. (Sorry about that.) But also think of Patrick Mahomes because of the way Jurgensen completed passes with all kinds of arm-slots, including a behind the back pass on one occasion with the Eagles.

But calling Jurgensen the best pure passer understates his case. He wasn’t just a great passer, he was also a great quarterback with leadership skills that endeared him to his teammates and enabled him to lead them to improbable come-from-behind wins, including several against Dallas. (The Redskins’ ability to compete with superior Dallas teams during the mid-1960s helped create the great Redskins-Cowboys rivalry that persisted for several decades until the Redskins were no longer able to compete.)

In 1969, Vince Lombardi, the legendary Green Bay Packers coach, took over the Redskins. He had no doubt about Jurgensen’s greatness as a quarterback. In fact, Lombardi said of Sonny: "He may be the best the league has ever seen. He is the best I have seen." He also said that if Jurgensen had been with him in Green Bay, the Pack would never have lost. This seems like an exaggeration But the Packers rarely lost anyway, and pairing their phenomenal defense and running game with Jurgensen’s arm would have been a sight to behold.

Under Lombardi’s leadership, it was back to the Pro Bowl for Jurgensen, along with another league-leading yardage season and fifth place in the MVP voting. But Lombardi, stricken with cancer, was unable to coach the following season and he would be dead before long.

This leads to one of the two “what-if” questions that Redskins fans have been asking for years: What would the Redskins have accomplished if Lombardi head been able to keep coaching with Jurgensen as his QB?

We’ll never know, but the team went on to accomplish quite a bit after George Allen took over in 1971. It won the NFC championship the following year, but lost in the Super Bowl to Miami.

This leads to the second “what-if.” Allen was a defensive coach. For him, the purpose of offense seemed to be not to lose the game for his defense, a concept that reemerged in last night’s Super Bowl.

Accordingly, Allen preferred Billy Kilmer to Jurgensen as his starting quarterback. (The two became great, life-long friends.) In any case, Allen selected Kilmer to start the Super Bowl. (To be fair, Kilmer had led the team that far.)

What if Jurgensen had been at the helm? I’m not prepared to say Washington would have beaten Miami, a great team that went undefeated that year. But I will say it’s very unlikely that Washington’s offense would have failed to score, as it did with Kilmer at quarterback.

Redskins fans got a glimpse of how Jurgensen could play against Miami’s famous “no-name defense” early in the 1974 season. Sonny, age-40, rallied the team from deficits of 10-0 and 17-13, ending the day with a 60-yard drive that culminated in a touchdown pass with only 16 seconds left on the clock.

Jurgensen continued to split the quarterbacking duties with Kilmer for two more seasons. In his final year, 1974, he had the league’s best passer rating (albeit in only four games) at the age of 40. During his four years under George Allen, Jurgensen started only 13 games. The Redskins won 11 of them.

At the time of his retirement, Jurgensen had the highest pass completion percentage in NFL history. He also had the league’s highest career passer rating at the time.

After retiring, Jurgensen became a local broadcasting legend. His appearances on various Redskins shows were must-see TV for Redskins fans.

What really stood out, however, was his work as a color commentator, along with his pal and fellow legend Sam Huff, during radio broadcasts of Redskins games. Jurgensen talked offense, Huff talked defense but mostly provided comic relief.

They became a D.C. sports institution. Countless fans bought devices that would sync up their broadcasts with the television feed so that Sonny and Sam would be the voices accompanying the pictures. Jurgensen continued to enlighten us with his commentary until he turned 85 in 2019. (Huff had left the booth in 2013.)

Jurgensen loved to call the Redskins plays before the snap. He his calls were usually accurate. And when he wasn’t right about what was called, he was usually right about what should have been called — and wasn’t shy about saying so.

Jurgensen and Huff were “homers” in the sense that they rooted openly and loudly for the team. But they weren’t at all reluctant to criticize the team, unlike so many with the same job.

Jurgensen’s broadcasting work endeared him to at least two new generations of Redskins fans. No wonder news of his death on Friday caused both local sports-call stations to stop talking about the upcoming Super Bowl. Calls poured in from Redskins royalty, including fellow quarterbacks Billy Kilmer and Joe Theismann, to pay tribute to the team’s greatest legend.

RIP