Every Chiefs starting QB who never made the Super Bowl, ranked

In January 1970, the Chiefs won the Super Bowl. Then they stepped away from that spotlight for the next 50 years.

Between 1971 and 2019, 49 Super Bowls came and went without Kansas City. Generations of Chiefs fans were raised in a world where the biggest annual sports broadcast was reserved for other teams and never their own. Winning seasons, including a handful of 12- and 13-win campaigns, only served to raise hopes high enough for the eventual fall to really hurt.

Until Patrick Mahomes came along.

The 2018 NFL MVP needed only two years as a starter to end the Chiefs’ Super Bowl drought. He’ll take on the San Francisco 49ers in Super Bowl 54, 18,284 days after Len Dawson and Jan Stenerud teamed up to topple the Vikings as 12-point underdogs in Super Bowl IV.

Dawson was the alpha when it comes to Kansas City’s Super Bowl quarterbacks. For the foreseeable future, barring disaster, Mahomes will be the omega. What about all the quarterbacks who came in between?

From the 1970 season through 2018, 48 different quarterbacks have thrown a pass for the Chiefs, 31 started at least one game, and 29 didn’t make the Super Bowl. They range from legendary (Joe Montana, Warren Moon) to entirely forgettable (Tony Adams, Brodie Croyle).

These rankings, which are entirely subjective, are based on overall impact, team success, and individual success. Some guys got bumped up because they played in a certain QB-friendly era (hello, Damon Huard). Others slipped because they were surrounded by underwhelming teammates.

With that said, here’s Kansas City’s non-Super Bowl quarterback rankings broken into eight different categories.

Between ‘87 and 2007, Hudson was the only Chiefs draftee to make a start at quarterback for Kansas City. What a start it was.

Hudson took the field alongside a cast of replacement players in the heart of the 1987 NFLPA strike. He’d throw one incompletion, was sacked on his second dropback, and fumbled a handoff in the end zone that led to a Broncos’ safety. He was replaced the very next drive by Matt Stevens and would never play another snap in the NFL. His pro career lasted maybe five minutes. It resulted, officially, in a net loss of 10 yards and -2 points.

Beautiful.

Croyle went 10-2 in his final season at Alabama. Quinn went 19-6 in his final two years at Notre Dame. Together, they went 1-17 as Chiefs starting quarterbacks.

Seurer finished his NFL career with two starts and a 36.9 passer rating (going 0-20 with zero interceptions would have got him to 39.6). Palko went 1-3 as a starter despite a 2:7 TD:INT ratio and 3.9 adjusted yards per pass in 2011. The fact he won a game is wild. Stevens’ only NFL opportunity came as a replacement player in 1987. He went 0-2.

Adams threw 22 interceptions and only nine touchdowns in four years as a Chief. Thigpen’s 2008 stats were decent (18 passing TDs, three rushing TDs, and one receiving TD), but the Chiefs just won one of his starts.

Vlasic got the opportunity to start late for a playoff-bound Chiefs team in 1991, then sprained his knee after six passes. Though he didn’t get the start, he returned to the lineup in the Divisional Round and threw four interceptions against the Bills. 40 percent of Daniel’s career starts came in Kansas City. He’s made more than $34 million as a pro and is still in the league — he even proved he can be roughly as good as Mitchell Trubisky by starting for the Bears in 2019.

Pelluer’s 1-1-1 record with Kansas City may have been the high point of his seven-year career. It’s also worth nothing that Pete Beathard threw 64 passes in relief duty for the team in 1973, though never started for the team.

No wait, I’m sorry. What I meant to say was that it’s worth noting that Pete Beathard’s middle name is Falconer, which sounds like the kind of prog rock band you’d airbrush onto the side of a conversion van.

Blackledge never completed more than 50 percent of his passes in any season in which he started an NFL game. He was drafted seventh overall in 1983 in front of Jim Kelly, Ken O’Brien, and Dan Marino and is the second-highest draft pick QB in franchise history behind only Pete Falconer Beathard.

Livingston led the league with three fourth-quarter comebacks in 1976. It was also the year he set a career high in completion rate ... at 55.9 percent. He gave way to Fuller, who was the Chiefs’ first-round pick in 1979. Fuller rose to the team’s starting role as a rookie, was sacked 120 times in four years, and later went on to win an NFL title while filling in for Jim McMahon as part of the Bears’ 1985 Super Bowl Shuffle crew.

Kenney made it to the Pro Bowl months after the Chiefs drafted Blackledge and then stuck around for five more years, mostly to clean up Blackledge’s mess. He’s the only player in this group to throw for more touchdowns than interceptions in the NFL.

and then a big gap ...

One of the Chiefs’ proudest traditions from the 1980s until the Mahomes era was their unquenched desire for other teams’ veteran quarterbacks. Jaworski and Moon both had past-their-prime stints as Kansas City backups. Jaworski was particularly awful (36 completed passes, five INTs in six games) and probably belongs back in the high 20s. Moon (completion rate with the Chiefs: 43 percent) wasn’t much better.

Orton backed up Matt Cassel and played very Orton-ly, going 2-1 as a starter but throwing just one touchdown pass in that span. Foles won each of the three games in which he appeared and showed off the form that would make him a Super Bowl MVP one season later. Both these guys were fine!

Do these guys belong above Moon, Jaworski, Orton, and Foles? I struggled with that decision. Cassel and Huard were both starters on Chiefs teams that eventually made it to the playoffs (even if Huard didn’t take a single postseason snap for Kansas City), so that lands them in the top 10 with the least emphatic endorsement I can make.

Don’t let that convince you that either of these men were anything more than lighthouses casting the Chiefs’ 50-year Super Bowl drought out to the fog so the rest of the NFL could see. Huard outplayed Trent Green in 2006 to briefly give hope that Kansas City had stumbled upon a budding QB in the league’s free agent bargain bin. He fell apart in 2007 (necessitating the Croyle era) and made just three starts in 2008.

Cassel was brought in to fix that problem after leading the Patriots to an 11-5 season in Tom Brady’s stead. He made it to a Pro Bowl in 2010 by throwing for 3,116 yards and 27 touchdowns — the latter of which is still a top-five single-season Chiefs mark, because this list is transparently an essay about failure. He never approached those numbers again and was released in 2013 after four seasons and $46 million in earnings.

Gannon and Krieg were basically the same player; two veteran quarterbacks in their early 30s who were perfectly cromulent with the Chiefs but way better playing for West Coast teams (Krieg was a three-time Pro Bowler for the Seahawks before becoming a Chief. Gannon won an MVP award with the Raiders several years after leaving KC). You’d be forgiven for mistaking one for the other. Their passing stats suggest “Rich Gannon” was just Dave Krieg with shoe lifts and a crew cut.

Truly this was the 90s Pepsi vs. Coke debate for mediocre Missouri-based quarterbacks.

The only team to love San Francisco quarterbacks more than the 49ers is the Chiefs. Five different passers made the move east, and each turned out pretty well in a different shade of red in Kansas City.

Bono was a 49ers quarterback from 1989 to 1993. He emerged as a Pro Bowler after leading his team to a 13-3 record in 1995, even though his 6.0 yards per pass ranked 28th among 30 qualified quarterbacks that fall. He completed only 11 of his 25 passes and threw three interceptions in a 10-7 Divisional Round playoff loss to an underdog Indianapolis team, and he was replaced late in the game by Gannon.

On the plus side, he was responsible for the weirdest, most glorious touchdown run of the 1990s (and possibly ever?).

DeBerg, a 49ers quarterback from 1978 to 1980, had never won more than five games in 10 seasons as a sometimes-starting quarterback in the NFL. Then he arrived in Kansas City and pushed the Chiefs to three winning seasons (and two playoff appearances) in four years. He led the league in both interception rate (0.9 percent) and adjusted net yards per pass (7.6 — better than Russell Wilson’s 2019 number!) in 1990.

He was the only Chiefs QB to win a playoff game between 1971 and 1993. Kansas City scored 10 points that afternoon against Todd Marinovich’s Raiders. DeBerg passed for 89 yards.

Grbac played for San Francisco from 1994 to 1996. He signed with Kansas City in 1997 and had one decent year and one awful one before breaking out in 1999 and 2000 (7,558 passing yards, 50 touchdowns those two seasons). That led to one Pro Bowl nod and, in true Chiefs fashion, zero playoff wins.

Breaking up an otherwise unheard-of run of San Francisco retreads is Green. He was originally supposed to be the face of the Rams’ turnaround, but was displaced thanks to a preseason injury and Kurt Warner’s emergence. He eventually led Missouri’s other NFL team to a period of relative prosperity in the early 2000s.

Green was low-key kinda great under Dick Vermeil — the same coach who’d groomed him for St. Louis’ starting job two years before. Flanked by the All-Pro combo of Priest Holmes and Tony Gonzalez, he threw for more than 240 yards per game in Kansas City. Like Bono, he led the team to a 13-3 record in 2003. And, just like Bono, he was bounced out of the playoffs by the Colts without winning a single game.

Green claims five of the top 10 passing seasons in Chiefs history by total yardage, which is wild since he only spent 5.5 seasons as their starting QB. While that’s going to change thanks to Mahomes, Green deserves credit for throwing an often ground-based team into the pass-heavy NFL of his time.

It turns out these two were pretty evenly matched at the top of the Chiefs’ “pretty good!” quarterback hierarchy. You could make the case for either guy as the top non-Dawson, non-Mahomes passer of Kansas City’s past 50+ years. Smith had better numbers, played longer, and missed fewer games to injury. Montana was Joe Montana. He unsurprisingly had more postseason success.

Let’s start with the very arguable No. 2 spot on this list. With Steve Young entrenched as the Niners’ starting QB, Montana followed his 49ers quarterback coach Paul Hackett, who was named the Chiefs’ offensive coordinator, to Kansas City in 1993. While the four-time Super Bowl champion was diminished in his age 37 and 38 seasons — the last two of his career — he was still an efficient presence behind center who led his team to playoff berths in both his years with the team.

His two (TWO) playoff wins were the most by any Kansas City starting quarterback between 1971 and 2018. 47 years. Good lord.

Smith went 51-30 in his five seasons as the Chiefs’ starter. His 94.9 passer rating in Kansas City is second-best on this list, behind only Foles (who only made one start with the franchise). Smith’s teams never recorded a losing season with him at the helm and earned four playoff appearances. Though he only won one of those games, he was statistically better in the postseason (a 96.0 rating) than in the regular season.

Kansas City traded two second-round picks to San Francisco to rescue the supplanted former No. 1 overall pick from backup duty for the 49ers. He rewarded that faith with the most successful five-year run of any Chiefs quarterback since the 1960s. He even brought back a third-round pick and cornerback Kendall Fuller when the club handed the reins to Mahomes and traded Smith to Washington.

That’s good enough to make him No. 1 on this list — even if it wasn’t enough to even get Kansas City to an AFC title game.