49ers All-Time Top 5 QBs Part 1: YoungTana

Joe Montana and Steve Young were the Best of Rivals. But someone was to rank first on the all-time 49ers list. And it ain't gonna be Jimmy Garoppolo.

To paraphrase Douglas Adams: 49ers quarterback history is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's hard to properly rank Josh Allen, Lamar Jackson, Joe Burrow and Justin Herbert, but that's just peanuts compared to 49ers quarterback history.

Joe Montana, Steve Young, Bill Walsh and their interrelationships are the subjects of an intimidating array of histories and memoirs. There’s Best of Rivals by Adam Lazarus. Young has written an autobiography. Montana has put his name on a self-improvement guide. Gary Myers wrote The Catch, which focuses on the 1981 season. Walsh wrote Finding the Winning Edge, Building a Champion and The Score Takes Care of Itself, which are in varying degrees of print.

For tactical discussions of the Walsh/Montana/Young influence, there’s The Genius of Desperation by friend-of-the-Zone Doug Farrar. Just about any other book about football strategy from the last 30 years will discuss the West Coast Offense in some way. There are 49ers histories, biographies for kids, books by and about Jerry Rice and other 49ers greats of the 1980s, and more.

My standard approach to All Time Top Five capsules – a mix of stats, searches for quotes by Tex Maule or George Vecsey and personal anecdotes about watching Super Bowl XXIII in a St. Jerome’s Hall dorm room with two other guys and a case of Keystone Light – feels inadequate to the task of contextualizing Young and Montana. It’s a little bit like summarizing thoughts about the Renaissance like: “Hey, the life expectancy back then was 37 years, Will Durant has some cool thoughts on this matter and I saw some neat paintings the one time I visited Europe.” Anything I write feels a little inconsequential, which isn’t a problem one encounters when discussing, say, Neil Lomax.

So forgive me if I stick to aerial photographs of Young and Montana here in Part I. Part II of the All Time Top Five QBs will cover non-Mount Rushmore types of the distant past and immediate present, and will therefore be more granular.

Anyway, here’s “Wonderwall.”

1. Steve Young

Surprised? Eh, you probably aren’t.

Here are the 49ers’ all-time top quarterback DYAR performances:

1. Steve Young 1992 1,931

2. Steve Young 1994 1,900

3. Jeff Garcia 2000 1,873

4. Steve Young 1998 1,809

5. Brock Purdy 2003 1,708

6. Steve Young 1993 1,668

7. Joe Montana 1983 1,665

8. Joe Montana 1989 1,632

9. Joe Montana 1984 1,419

10. Joe Montana 1985 1,357

To be clear, I’m using Adjusted DYAR, which weighs rushing value a tiny bit higher when evaluating quarterbacks. Young doesn’t need the boost to wipe the floor with Montana. His 1992 and 1994 seasons would still rank ahead of Montana’s best seasons without a single rushing yard.

Young led the NFL in passing touchdowns four times, efficiency rating six times and Adjusted Net Yards per Attempt four times. Montana led the NFL in touchdowns in two strike-shortened years, efficiency rating twice and ANY/A once.

Montana is one of the greatest postseason quarterbacks in pro football history; he probably ranks second to Tom Brady on such a list. Young’s early career as a starter was defined by playoff losses; the 49ers victory in Super Bowl XXIX was famously his moment of redemption/validation.

If you look at Montana’s early Super Bowl runs, however, it’s striking how often the 49ers defense saved him in high-turnover playoff games. Montana also endured first-round playoff exits, one of them a very literal knockout at the hands of the Giants defense, from 1985-87.

Montana threw 19 touchdown passes and zero interceptions in the 1989 and 1990 postseasons, forever earning his all-time clutch reputation. I don’t think that’s nearly enough to push him past Young, who produced far better regular-season statistics in the same era with similar supporting casts. The 49ers went 8-6 in the postseason under Young, which only looks shabby next to Montana at 14-5.

Young is a difficult quarterback to rank among the all-time greats. He spent two years in the USFL, playing on a reported $40-million contract, for a franchise so broke that its coaches (including John Hadl, whom we have met) had to take players into their homes when the team was kicked out of its training camp hotel.

Young spent two more years on a Buccaneers team that went 2-14 both seasons; meddlesome doofus owner Hugh Culverhouse hired Leeman Bennett as head coach even though Bennett had spent the previous three years working at an RV dealership, then decided to fire him 15 minutes before a press conference which was supposed to announce his retention. That should give you a broad idea of what the Bucs were like in Young’s day.

So Young spent the first four years of his pro career in historically bad environments. No modern team can match the mismanagement of the Los Angeles Express or Culverhouse Bucs. Not even the Jets.

Young then spent four seasons behind Montana. He certainly learned much from Montana and Bill Walsh. But again: these are historically rare circumstances.

Young’s first three years as a starter, one of them an MVP season, were defined and overshadowed by Montana’s legacy; Montana was still there for two of them. Young got slapped with the “can’t win the big game” label in those years. He ripped it off by winning the Super Bowl, but his career narrative is still one of late redemption, not sustained excellence. Young’s 1992 and 1993 may be the most underappreciated great years by any quarterback in pro football history. He ended his career with four post-Super Bowl seasons as one of the top five quarterbacks in the league, despite mounting injuries.

If his ascent looked anything like his decline – if we can just replace 1984-1990 with some of his “typical” late-career seasons – Young might be second to Brady on most all-time lists. Yet it’s also true that he went from some of the worst circumstances in pro football history to some of the best, inheriting peak Jerry Rice, as well as John Taylor, Ricky Watters, Brent Jones and (eventually) Terrell Owens. If we give Young bonus credit for years when he did not start, do we also grade on a flattening curve based on his supporting cast?

That’s the sort of reasoning I shy away from. But I think Young gets the short shrift from folks who argue all-time greats based on rings due to his late start, Montana’s shadow and two playoff losses to the Wowboys. He then gets left off the all-time stats lists, again because of his late starts. Throw in being a lefty, a scrambler, a bit of an intellectual and someone whose salary was as much a topic of discussion as his performance for most of his career, and it’s easy to place Young in the “miscellaneous” category when ranking all-time greats. Doing so is a disservice to the memory of how outstanding he was, for a reasonably long time.

2. Joe Montana

Montana’s career stats, as expressed as a 17-game season: 3,590 yards, 24 touchdowns, 12 interceptions, a 63.2% completion rate, 7.5 yards per attempt, an efficiency rating of 92.3.

The NFL’s 2024 passing averages, when expressed as a single quarterback’s statistics in a 17-game season: 3,999.5 yards, 25.3 touchdowns, 12.1 interceptions, a 65.3% completion rate, 7.1 yards per attempt and an efficiency rating of 92.3.

In other words, Montana’s excellence became, over the course of 40 years, the NFL’s quarterback job description. His era-defining, strategy-reshaping statistics have become our perception of “ordinary.”

Yes, there’s some statistical cherry-picking in the comparison above. I didn’t mention sack rate: Montana’s was 5.49; the current average is 6.9. Quarterback rushing stats have changed significantly. Montana’s career did not have a slow rise, nor a long late-career of ineffectiveness, so he has few statistically weak seasons weighing down his all-time stats.

But the broader point holds water. Contemporary “average” quarterbacks look like Montana: medium-strength arms, adequate-not-great mobility, less-than-imposing size, great accuracy, outstanding leadership, the intangible abilities required to operate an offense. “Leadership” is defined by Montana’s persona in a way: unflappable corporate cool, as opposed to Ken Stabler’s alpha-biker toughness, Terry Bradshaw’s thrillbilly charisma or even Roger Staubach’s military discipline. And for most teams, the offense to be operated is still a direct descendant of the one Bill Walsh perfected for Montana. When we say “system fit,” we are implicitly stating that some standard-issue quarterback can be plugged into a Montana-shaped slot in a team’s tactics.

In 1980, Montana’s first season as a starter, three seasons after the NFL made radical rule changes to help the passing game, coaches were still figuring out how to adjust to the new offensive environment. NFL quarterbacks still threw more interceptions than touchdowns that year (22.4 per team/season to 21.6). The league’s completion percentage in 1980 was still just 56.2, and the league’s yards-per-attempt average was just 5.8.

As you certainly know, Montana and Bill Walsh rapidly revolutionized the NFL with what became the West Coast Offense: a system emphasizing short passes, three-step drops, a wide variety of formations and other tactics which can still be found in the drivetrain of nearly every modern system. Completion rates increased, interception rates decreased and copycats grafted the most effective elements of Walsh’s scheme onto theirs. Montana’s 49ers also won four Super Bowls in eight years, three under Walsh and one with George Seifert as head coach, so there’s no mystery as to why Montana became archetypal. Though it's still worth interrogating the history a little further.

If you wagered in the early 1980s about which offensive system would come to dominate the NFL in 40 years, you would not have bet on the nascent Montana/Walsh WCO. The smart money would have been on Air Coryell.

When the Montana-led 49ers won Super Bowl XVI after the 1981 season, the San Diego Chargers had the best passing attack in the NFL. The Chargers, coached by Don Coryell and helmed by Dan Fouts, produced 7.1 Adjusted Net Yards per Attempt in 1981. The 49ers ranked fifth in ANY/A with 6.2 that year.

Former Coryell assistant Joe Gibbs was already in Washington by then. He coached Joe Theismann, the Hogs and Smurfs to a Super Bowl victory in strike-shortened 1982. That team reached the Super Bowl again in 1983, leading the NFL with 7.2 ANY/A. They lost to the Raiders, who were coached by Tom Flores, a former offensive assistant under John Madden, one of Coryell’s most fervent disciples. Flores’ Raiders also won the Super Bowl in 1980, beating an Eagles team whose top offensive lieutenant was Sid Gillman, who was Coryell’s early-career mentor.

If you watch footage from the early 1980s, you will discover that the Gibbs and Coryell offenses even LOOK more modern and innovative than the early Walsh/Montana offense: single-back sets in an era when two-back sets had been ubiquitous for decades, three-receiver formations on early downs, tight ends as motion slot receivers, etc. Gibbs’ innovations, including the motion H-back, were well-suited to countering the fearsome pass rushes of the era.

Oh and while the Chargers had Dan Fouts, the Raiders and Gibbs’ teams won Super Bowls with journeymen: wouldn’t you want to copy a system that turned creaky old Jim Plunkett and Doug Williams into winners?

The Coryell family of offenses even captured the imaginations of fans. My preteen friends and I would shout “Air Coryell” after a big play on the touch-football sandlot. If we were playing tackle, a rumbling run would be congratulated with a Rigginomics comparison. (The fact that we were all white kids probably had some role in that one.) We respected the early 1980s Niners, too. Any lad who intercepted a pass or delivered a big tackle became Ronnie Lott, except for the stinking Cowboys fan who called himself Everson Walls. (We would then kick the shit out of him.) But the Coryell teams brought the fireworks and won some Super Bowls.

A funny thing happened as the 1980s wore on. Most of the truly great quarterbacks failed to win the Super Bowl: John Elway (in that era), Dan Marino, Jim Kelly, Warren Moon, Fouts. The teams that won Super Bowls, meanwhile, were often led by good-not-great quarterbacks: Plunkett, Theismann, Williams (with Schroeder), Jim McMahon (with Steve Fuller), Phil Simms, Jeff Hostetler (with Simms), Mark Rypien in 1991.

When you hear a fan, columnist or coach of my generation or older insisting that “defense wins championships,” it’s because defense really did win championships through the 1980s! Most of the offenses that were newfangled at the time and still look pre-modern today, from Kelly’s up-tempo K-Gun to the run ‘n’ shoot, got routinely splattered by the defenses fielded by Bill Parcells and Mike Ditka, and by Gibbs’ exquisitely-oiled machine. There appeared to be something innately wrong with them, and by extension with the quarterbacks running them.

The only great quarterback to win Super Bowls in the 1980s was Montana. It made him look exceptional, in the precise definition of the term.

It helped that Montana had outstanding defenses. The 1981 Niners finished second in yards allowed and points allowed to the coked-out-of-their-gourds Eagles; the offense finished 13th and seventh. The 1984 champions finished second to Marino’s Dolphins in both points and yards but first in fewest points allowed and 10th in yards allowed. They won their playoff games 21-10 (over Simms’ Giants) and 23-0 (Fuller’s Bears). Lott was almost as big a star as Montana or Dwight Clark.

Montana only reached living legend status in 1988, with his “Hey look, John Candy” Super Bowl comeback over the Bengals and the 49ers’ demolition of Elway’s Broncos the next year. There’s nothing unusual about a quarterback cementing his legacy late in his career. But think of the perceptual impact those four Super Bowls had. Statistically flashy, cannon-armed quarterbacks could not win the big game. Journeymen supported by lethal defenses could, but they tended to grind against each other in the NFC playoffs. And here was Montana, who was able to sustain success through changes in coaches and supporting casts, whose team was getting better when the Bears and Raiders were collapsing.

Best of all, Montana didn’t throw as hard or run as fast as Elway, nor as often as Marino/Fouts/Moon. He wasn’t a pain in the ass like McMahon or the young Kelly. He looked and acted like a guy you could find in any draft class and add to your roster without making waves.

Walsh, meanwhile, did not run a Parcells or Ditka-like cult of personality. Like Gibbs, he ran a system, a recipe that could be replicated. His defensive coordinator replaced him in 1989, and the 49ers got better.

Weaker teams didn’t auto-plunder the Super Bowl participants for their coordinators early in the 1980s, though it sometimes happened (Buddy Ryan, in one famous instance). Walsh actually kept many of his top lieutenants for much of the decade. It’s only in the early 1990s, with Walsh retired and Montana injured/benched/off to Kansas City, that the 49ers could not produce Mike Holmgren, Dennis Green, Mike Shanahan and Jon Gruden-types fast enough to meet the demand.

Oh, and what was happening to the 49ers during the great bloom of Walsh’s family tree? Steve Young, with a stronger arm, better wheels and gaudier stats than his predecessor, spent three seasons not winning the big game.

So Shanahan and Holmgren, the coordinators during the early Young seasons, left for other jobs looking for a certain type of quarterback. So did Gruden, an offensive assistant in 1990.

Some of Holmgren’s proteges, most notably Andy Reid, would eventually develop a taste for the more Brett Favre-like explosiveness of Donovan McNabb and Patrick Mahomes. Gruden and Shanahan’s sometimes-literal descendants, meanwhile, have usually hitched their fates to Brad Johnson, Matt Hasselbeck, Derek Carr, Kirk Cousins, Jimmy Garoppolo, Jared Goff and now Brock Purdy, the “system fit” with ordinary traits and a stacked supporting cast. Furthermore, the NFL is now largely run by Walsh’s coaching great-grandnephews like Brian Callahan and Liam Coen, who strive to turn Cam Ward, Baker Mayfield and Trevor Lawrence into their version of an ideal quarterback: a modernized version of Joe Montana.

If I were ranking the most influential quarterbacks, Joe Montana would rank fourth. Otto Graham and Sid Luckman, the two guys who essentially invented “quarterback,” are tied for first. Mahomes, with all due respect to Moon and Williams, ranks third for obliterating all of the stigmas and preconceptions surrounding black quarterbacks, from the prejudices against freewheeling scramblers to the implicit biases and optics that equate “leadership” with looking and talking like an MBA candidate from the 1950s.

Montana was more influential than the unapproachable Tom Brady, oligarchic Peyton Manning, troublesome Brett Favre or did-everything-differently Young. He’s not tied to his coach and team like Batt Starr or Troy Aikman. He’s not a man from some roaring bygone era like Ken Stabler, Joe Namath or Bobby Layne. He had a sudden impact that Johnny Unitas and John Elway, with their saga-like careers, cannot match. Montana became a mold that still has not been totally broken.

Influence and greatness are two different things, however, which is why Young ranks ahead of Montana here. For the sake of diplomacy, I will concede that Montana nudges past Young if you include his Chiefs seasons, which do not count here. Both quarterbacks would make the Top Ten of any GOAT list worth your time.

But if I could have either of them in their prime, I’m taking Steve Young. And I am guessing that most of Walsh’s descendants would, too.

COMING ON THURSDAY: 49ers All-Time Top 5 QBs Part 2: Pretty, Pretty, Purdy Good.