Andrew Luck is the latest entrant in an honor roll of quarterbacks who have distinguished themselves at Stanford and in the NFL.
As this season started, Luck was being talked about as a player of the same stature as John Elway, '83, and Jim Plunkett, '70, generally considered the best QBs in Stanford history. Elway and Plunkett—who won the Heisman Trophy in 1970—followed superlative college careers with multiple Super Bowl championships as pros. But a full measure of Stanford's illustrious legacy at the quarterback position reveals a much longer list.
Like Elway and Plunkett, five others were first-team All-Americans in at least one season: Frankie Albert, '42, Bob Garrett, '54, John Brodie, '57, Mike Boryla, '74, and Guy Benjamin, '77, MA '94. Albert is best known for his brilliant ballhandling—he is credited with inventing the bootleg play—that helped popularize the wing T, a progenitor of modern offenses that rely on deception rather than brute force. Albert quarterbacked the 1940 Stanford team, the "Wow Boys," to an undefeated season and a Rose Bowl victory, and later starred with the San Francisco 49ers.
Three others of note were selected no later than the fourth round of the NFL draft: Steve Dils, '79, Steve Stenstrom, '94, and Trent Edwards, '06. Add in Don Bunce, '71, MD '77, who succeeded Plunkett and directed Stanford to its 1972 New Year's Day Rose Bowl win over Michigan, and prolific passers such as John Paye, '87, and Todd Husak, '99, MA '06, who rank high in a variety of Stanford record-book categories, and the list reflects even more strongly just about every kind of individual and team goal.
If Stanford was being dubbed "Quarterback U" by the '70s, other universities made impressive claims to the nickname in the following decades, partly because offenses became bolder and far more innovative. Among them were Miami, Brigham Young and even traditionally run-oriented Michigan, where a guy named Jim Harbaugh was the first quarterback in school history to throw for more than 300 yards in a game.
Dick Vermeil, best known for an NFL coaching career that included a Super Bowl victory with the St. Louis Rams, was a college quarterback at San Jose State and an assistant coach at Stanford in the late '60s. In his retirement as a winemaker in the Napa Valley, Vermeil has not scrutinized Luck's on-field skills the way he would have during all the years he prepped for NFL drafts with the Rams, Philadelphia Eagles and Kansas City Chiefs. But he says Stanford remains the school he thinks of first as "Quarterback U", and he sees a pivotal connection between Luck's decision to forgo the pros this season and how well he will fare in the NFL when he does get there.
"I think it shows great maturity that will be as valuable as physical talent in the NFL," says Vermeil. "It will translate into leadership in whatever organization he ends up with."
