Chargers All-Time Top 5 QBs: Mountain Men and Social Media Sensations
Dan Fouts nearly retires too soon, John Hadl gets dissed by Hank Stram, Stan Humphries gets body shamed, and the Herbert Hive suffers colony collapse.
Our final Top 5 of the AFC! Next week, we kick off the NFC North with the Bears. It’s gonna be … something.
1. Dan Fouts
Fouts has misread few things about himself. Don't call him a lumberjack, a mountain man or Moses, he says, referring to his dark beard and penchant for privacy with his wife and two children at their offseason retreat on the dry side of the Oregon mountains. “I ain't none of that,” he adds.
What, then, is Fouts? Rough, says Don Coryell, who joined the Chargers as head coach at the beginning of last season and whose pass‐oriented system has the bomb built into every play. Competitive, combative, a man's man, in the mold of Bradshaw and Staubach, are other descriptions used by teammates and rivals. “I do what I do,” Fouts says simply. – Neil Amdur, the New York Times, December 19, 1979.
Fouts’ father was the play-by-play announcer for the 49ers in the 1950s and 1960s. Fouts was the ball boy when John Brodie was the 49ers quarterback. Fouts’ high school coach claimed to have “discovered” Fouts tossing footballs around on the sideline, a tale that even Fouts found a little tall. Lightly recruited out of high school, Fouts started for three seasons for a mediocre Oregon program, then got selected in the third round of the 1973 draft by the worse-than-mediocre Chargers.
The Chargers were a marquee organization at the start of the AFL era: hotel tycoon Barron Hilton owned the team, legendary innovator Sid Gillman served as head coach and GM, and Al Davis literally worked his way up from the mailroom into a role as Gillman’s consigliere. By the 1970s, however, Eugene Klein owned the Chargers, with Harland Svare (an old-school NFL lifer better suited to a defensive coordinator role) acting as coach/GM. Klein began trading away stars soon after the merger, including John Hadl (see below). Worse, Klein allowed a psychiatrist buddy named Arnold Mandell to operate in a Jack Easterby-like organizational role. Mandell became a Dr. Feelgood of sorts, allegedly doling out thousands of doses of pregame uppers and postgame downers.
The Klein-Mandell story devolves into tales of wire-tapped prostitutes trying to determine if any Chargers players were partaking of the most dangerous drug of all: marijuana. Meanwhile, Svare gave up his coaching role to (eventually) Tommy Prothro when fans keyed Svare’s car after a loss. Here’s a detailed summary for those who want to go down this particular rabbit hole.
Anyway, Fouts joined a franchise well beyond the brink of chaos. He upstaged Johnny Unitas, acquired in a brilliant Klein/Svare move to replace Hadl, by leading a late-game rally against the Steelers in his rookie debut. Fouts went 0-5-1 as a starter in 1973, however, and he was no more effective over the next two years.
Bill Walsh briefly wandered into the Chargers organization as offensive coordinator in 1976. He modernized the Chargers offense a bit and recognized the less-than-cannon-armed Fouts’ potential. “It took his technical development for people to realize his other qualities—his assertiveness, his leadership, his intelligence,” Walsh later said. “And I'm not sure there is anyone as tough as he is in standing up to the rush.”
Fouts retired from football at the end of the 1976 season, and that’s the end of our story.
Wait … what?