Y.A. Tittle, Andy Dalton and why we don’t like quarterbacks any more

“They might have been harder on me than they were, except that I was in what I call the quarterback’s third stage,” Y.A. Tittle told the Los Angeles Times in 1987. “The first stage is when he’s young and you’re pulling for him. The second is when he’s mature and you’re second-guessing him. I was in the third stage, so old you just feel sorry for me.”

Tittle retired from football in 1964 as an all-time great quarterback who was terrible in the postseason. He played in four NFL Championship games -- 1957, 1961, 1962 and 1963 -- and lost them all (note: there was no playoff bracket then, two teams advance to the NFL Championship shortly after the regular season concluded). He had a 32.6 passer rating through those games, completing 43.8 percent of his passes for 657 yards, four touchdowns and 13 interceptions. In three consecutive postseason appearances with the New York Giants, 1961-63, Tittle threw one touchdown to 10 interceptions for a 17.5 quarterback rating. No quarterback had ever lost his first four postseason starts until Tittle. No one would do it again until Andy Dalton did it this past weekend.

Cincinnati doesn’t like Dalton like New York liked Tittle. One reason may be age. Tittle was 37 when the Giants lost the ‘63 NFL Championship to the Chicago Bears, making him a Stage 3 quarterback, too old to criticize. Dalton is 27, well into Stage 2 and old enough to be Cincinnati’s biggest source of consternation.

Another reason might be success. Tittle was named league MVP four times, held the league single season passing touchdown and career passing yardage records when he retired, and is a deserved inductee into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Dalton will not make the Hall of Fame barring a drastic turnaround.

But Tittle doesn’t just overshadow Dalton. It’s hard to think of a quarterback since who has been as embraced despite never winning big, especially in New York. Later in that Los Angeles Times story, Richard Hoffer wrote:

Tittle remained, instead, the toast of the town. That may be difficult for the quarterbacks who eventually succeeded him in New York to believe. Richard Todd was booed for the Jets, and Fran Tarkenton and Craig Morton were likewise despised as the Giants struggled.
Even Phil Simms, who got the Giants to where they are today, has heard boos this season.

The Times article was published just before the Giants played the Denver Broncos in Super Bowl XXI at the Rose Bowl, a game the Giants won. On the eve of a championship, more than 20 years after he retired, Tittle’s aura remained.

What did he do to become so beloved?

via Ebay

That’s Tittle on his haunches with a concussion and badly bruised ribs after being hit by the Steelers’ John Baker. The photo, taken by Morris Berman of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, ironically never ran in the paper before becoming an icon. The Gazette didn’t want it because it wasn’t an action shot. It showed, instead, what appeared to be a beaten man who could have been contemplating the previous play just as easily as the uncertain decades to come. It was 1964, and Tittle was playing his last season.

What Berman’s editors didn’t see -- and everybody else did, apparently, based on the number of awards Berman won for the shot -- was that fans could empathize with sports stars. Beyond getting Just-The-Facts from sports coverage, fans wanted to relate. Tittle was relatable. He was an attainable six-feet tall, bald and frumpy. He spoke like a guy who just wandered into celebrity.

“I think the high point of my career was standing on the field when we beat Cleveland in 1961 to win the Eastern Division and listening to the fans count the seconds down: ‘Six, five, four ...’,” Tittle told the New Orleans Times-Picayune in 1995. “It was a special moment. I called my wife after the game. I got as far as ‘Hello, honey,’ before starting to cry. It was the most futile phone call I ever made.”

Tittle gave away his emotions freely, which seems contrary to a time, now, when being anything other than a hyper-condensed ball of competitiveness is somehow a bad thing as an athlete. Take, for example, the fact that we’re already bracing for scouting reports calling Marcus Mariota “soft” this spring. Mariota seems like a Tittle doppleganger, in that he’s a nice guy who also happens to be more talented than everyone else at his position. If you’re a quarterback, ESPN has already written or is prepping the expose on your perceived flaw.

Tittle came off as an unabashed aww-shucks man during his playing career and after, like in 1986 when he wrote a story for the New York Times in which he admitted that he could root for two teams at the same time, and also that he has never had an orgy:

Then, all of a sudden last Sunday, I’m watching a very important game between the Giants and the 49ers, and Pat Summerall, whom I played with, starts reflecting on the old days, and they started flashing shots of all the guys - Gifford, Red Webster, Katcavage, Shofner, Rosie Brown, myself. The sight of that blue uniform, and the Giant fans - well, it was really something. It brought back a lot of memories. And all of sudden my support for the 49ers began to waver. I don’t know whether you can love two women at the same time, but I know you can love two good football teams.

Tittle also let us know how much it hurt to never surmount the title hump, speaking with NPR in 1995:

“I was disappointed because for so many years I’d chased the whale, had never really won the championship game. We’d won our district championship when I was in high school, we went and lost in a crucial game later. We didn’t go as far as we could have gone. Going to college, we played in the Cotton Bowl, tied with Arkansas, [we were] a much better football team than Arkansas that year but we caught a snowstorm there. The same thing seemed to follow me all my life, never ever really winning the big game.”

Andy Dalton may feel the same way. His postseason struggles have been the subject of extensive psychoanalysis from media, players and fans, and one would understand if Dalton has spent the last few days taking internal stock of himself. A subscription to a sports imaging service reveals plenty of photos of Dalton in introspective poses, too.

Getty Images

That’s Dalton watching the final seconds of the Bengals’ playoff loss tick away. While the photo doesn’t have the most dramatic elements of the Tittle picture -- the blood, the slump, the subject in isolation -- it’s essentially the same portrait -- a quarterback contemplating what the hell is going to happen next.

There’s also this picture of essentially the same moment:

And this picture of Dalton on his back after a big hit by the Steelers:

Aaron Doster-USA TODAY Sports

And this picture of Dalton disappointed during the Bengals’ loss to the Patriots:

Getty Images

We can paint Dalton in a mythic light if we want to. Whether he deserves that treatment is one question, however. Another is if anyone would care if he did. Tittle may have been singularly endearing, but he also had the benefit of playing in an era when it was much harder to inundate fans with the same images and stories until they are forced to ask yeah, but what has he REALLY done.

The Giants went to the championship game twice in the three years before Tittle arrived in a trade with San Francisco. By today’s standards fans would have been right to be frustrated (New York was bounced out five times in six years, Cincinnati is 4-for-6) by the end of Tittle’s tenure.

But the two men were separated by everything else when they set the same dubious record -- by age, by their non-postseason numbers and, perhaps more importantly, by the encompassing culture. At a glance, Tittle sparked an era of empathy that burned hot and burned out before quarterbacks like Dalton had arrived. Now, in whatever fashion Dalton ultimately leaves Cincinnati, it won’t be a fond departure unless the Bengals can progress in the postseason. Fifty years ago that may not have been the case.

We may never love a loser again.