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By Mike Piellucci 2h ago
19 in ’19 highlights the 19 most impactful Cowboys, Rangers, Mavericks and Stars throughout the history of each franchise. Our staff voted on the top 19 from all four combined lists to create these overall rankings. You can find all of our team lists and profiles here.
Looking back, it seems impossible. Perhaps it should have been.
How could anyone conceive of a scenario quite like the one on Dec. 23, 1972: Roger Staubach coming off the bench ice-cold in a road playoff game, having thrown only 20 passes all season, then tossing two touchdowns with less than 90 seconds remaining to defeat the Cowboys’ archrivals?
Somehow, it happened – because the most clutch athlete in Dallas history made it so.
Roger Staubach is far more than the sum of his late-game heroics. He is one of the most decorated football players of all time, a Heisman winner and national champion runner-up in college turned two-time Super Bowl winner and All-Decade teamer in the pros, as well as a Hall of Famer at both levels. He is an American icon who commanded 130 soldiers in the Vietnam War and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom just last year. He is a Dallas luminary, a walking blueprint for how to embody the city during a playing career and then bloom alongside it in retirement. No amount of words poured onto the page could encapsulate the depth of his impact. It is indescribable.
But if there is one area that begins to encapsulate everything – his skill and his success and his significance – it’s Staubach’s precision when the chips were down. He authored 23 game-winning drives over his career, 17 of which came with less than two minutes remaining in regulation or in overtime. His nickname practically wrote itself: “Captain Comeback.”
The moniker was born from one game in particular, a heated postseason matchup against the San Francisco 49ers. It created a legacy that transcended his impressive statistics and championships. It canonized him as the ultimate winner and the ultimate athlete to believe in – not only for everyone watching, but for the men who lined up with him every week for more than a decade.
“There wasn’t anything that really set him apart until that game,” says defensive lineman Larry Cole, Staubach’s teammate for his entire career. “That’s when it was different, and the feeling of the team was different … That was the first time we became believers that, (with) Roger Staubach, we’d always be in the game if we were playing up to snuff.” [HR][/HR]
But, how?
Or, more precisely, why? Why was Staubach – who played his first NFL game at age 27, who had exactly one regular season’s worth of starts under his belt by his 30[SUP]th[/SUP] birthday, who didn’t even have the starting job to himself until midway through the year he won his first Super Bowl – so adept at staging comeback after comeback after comeback in the fires of the fourth quarter, the time of game in which even the most seasoned quarterbacks can crumble?
Theories abound. There were his natural gifts, in particular the sort of scrambling ability that kept plays alive in an era long before mobile quarterbacks became ubiquitous. There was also the matter of Tom Landry, whose hard-nosed tactics forged mentally tough teams.
“I like to say he was through the pressure cooker of Tom Landry,” says running back Calvin Hill, Staubach’s teammate from 1969 through 1974. “Tom Landry, by the time you got through with his camps — and even in the season, his practices, his skull sessions — you’re either with him or you didn’t (make it).”
Yet Staubach was hardly the only dual-threat quarterback the game has seen, nor was he Landry’s only starting quarterback. The things that truly distinguished Staubach were personal to him.
Naturally, that began with his military background. The Naval Academy first taught Staubach how to follow orders, helping him empathize with the rank and file. Then, it molded him into a leader, with dozens of men entrusting their lives to him. Of course, he had leadership skills well beyond that of the average football player. Besides, Hill says, “He was around combat. I kind of think, whether it’s the fourth quarter or fourth and 1, that’s not the same as being in Vietnam. That’s real stress. That’s real pressure.”
Yet Bob Lilly, Staubach’s teammate from 1969 through 1974 and the Cowboys’ defensive heartbeat, insists that Staubach’s magnetism went far beyond what was drilled into him. “I think he was born with it as well,” Lilly says.
Staubach led in small ways, through tiny gestures. The former military commander would jokingly prod his teammates to go to the next station at practice instead of barking orders at them. If a receiver muffed a catch, he blamed his own throw instead – it was too high, he’d insist, or a touch behind. Prior to joining the Cowboys full time, Staubach used his military leave in 1968 to attend rookie training camp. Consequently, his teammates were inclined to treat him as a veteran when he joined the team full-time the following year, inviting him to join them out on the town during off nights in training camp instead of spending them with other first-year players, who were forbidden from taking part. Staubach refused, choosing instead to hang out with his fellow rookies at a second-rate pizza joint, then catch a second-run movie with them.
But he also led by modeling so many virtues the sport is built upon. Nobody worked harder, from the marathon film sessions with Landry to countless hours after practices begging anyone in earshot – even defensive linemen like Lilly – to run extra routes for him. He was so competitive that he insisted on leading every pre-practice warmup lap, going so far as to race anyone who tried to get ahead of him. Sometimes, he was too tough for his own good: Staubach missed almost the entirety of the 1972 regular season with a shoulder injury after colliding with Rams linebacker Marlin McKeever in a preseason game to fight for extra yards. It was a reckless, ultimately harmful idea – yet his teammates couldn’t help but be impressed.
“When people do that and you’re playing next to them, you go, ‘Well, shit. I better work pretty hard here, too, because I don’t want to be the loose cog in the wheel,” Cole says.
All of it converged to create something ineffable, a sorcery that made Staubach greater than the sum of his already considerable parts.
“I was going to say he could be a better running back than quarterback, but I don’t think so,” says Charlie Waters, who played with Staubach from 1970 through 1979. “Because there’s so much to quarterback than just calling the play in the huddle and finding the wide receiver or throwing the nice pass out there. It’s the leader of the team. It’s, ‘As the quarterback goes, so goes the team.’”
And on a chilly December afternoon in Candlestick Park, Staubach’s team needed him to rescue them from what seemed like certain defeat. [HR][/HR]
Their most famous battle occurred in the 1980s, and they dominated the NFC in the 1990s, but the Cowboys and 49ers’ rivalry truly began in the early 1970s with a trio of consecutive playoff games.
First, Dallas edged San Francisco 17-10 in the 1970 NFC Championship game at Kezar Stadium to reach Super Bowl V, the first Super Bowl in franchise history. (They ultimately lost to Baltimore, 16-13.) The Cowboys then bested the 49ers again the following year in Dallas, defeating San Francisco 14-3 to book a trip to Super Bowl VI. (Dallas emerged victorious, demolishing Miami 24-3 to claim the first of its five championships.)
The third matchup came in the opening round of the 1972 playoffs. This time, San Francisco had ample reason for confidence. Exactly one month earlier, the 49ers obliterated Dallas 31-10 in Texas Stadium. It was the Cowboys’ worst loss of the regular season, narrowly edging a 20-point defeat by the New York Giants in the regular-season finale that took place just one week prior to their rematch.
San Francisco had the momentum, in other words, as well as a health advantage. Staubach’s game-readiness was an open question: He returned from his shoulder injury in Week 10 but had only played in spot duty in the four games since. The most passes he threw in any one game was nine. Meanwhile, San Francisco’s quarterback, 1970 NFL MVP John Brodie, had returned from his own long-term injury the week prior, coming off the bench in the regular-season finale to throw two touchdowns and send the 49ers to the postseason with a 20-17 victory over Minnesota. On top of that, Staubach wasn’t even the biggest injury concern on Dallas’ roster — Lilly was. The 10-time Pro Bowl defensive tackle was battling a back injury severe enough to require a three-night hospital stay earlier in the week and multiple Novocain injections to make it onto the field.
No head coach was better equipped to exploit those advantages than San Francisco’s Dick Nolan, a former Landry lieutenant who served as the Cowboys’ defensive coordinator from 1962 through 1967 before taking over the 49ers in 1968.
“He knew Tom’s system as well as anybody in the league did,” says tight end Billy Truax, who played with Staubach from 1971 through 1973. “They had a little edge there as far as preparation.”
Immediately, it showed: San Francisco’s Vic Washington ran back the opening kick to stake the 49ers to an early 7-0 lead just 17 seconds into the game. It was the first kickoff returned for a touchdown against Dallas since 1966. The opening bell had only just rung, and already the challenger had stunned the champion.
“It seemed like before we could even sit down on offense,” says running back Calvin Hill. “We couldn’t even get our bearings.”
It would get worse from there. Brodie had San Francisco’s offense humming in the second quarter, marching the 49ers down the field to set up a pair of 1-yard touchdown runs by running back Larry Schreiber. Just about his only misstep came on a botched flea flicker, which Waters picked off at the Cowboys’ 1-yard line to thwart another San Francisco drive in Dallas territory.
“Most defensive guys go chasing after the run play,” Waters says. “Because I was a quarterback in college, I knew exactly what the play was right when they were doing it. I didn’t get faked out.”
It hardly seemed to matter, though, because Dallas couldn’t get untracked on offense. In particular, that meant Craig Morton, Staubach’s understudy and the former heir apparent to Don Meredith. On paper, Morton was the Platonic ideal of a quarterback, 6-foot-4 with a howitzer arm and a keen understanding of reading defenses. He was also effective, having stewarded Dallas to a 10-4 regular season with Staubach sidelined.
But Morton lacked Staubach’s elusiveness, a byproduct of two chronically bad knees. And, more damningly, he turned the ball over – he had thrown 21 interceptions against only 15 touchdowns that season. Both were on full display against San Francisco. Morton was sacked only once but crucially slipped and eventually fumbled in the second quarter to set up Schreiber’s first touchdown. On the very next possession, he threw an interception that led to Schreiber’s second. Morton wasn’t the only one struggling; Hill recorded a fumble of his own, which was recovered by Cowboys receiver Lance Alworth. But Morton was the offense’s engine, and he was sputtering. Apart from a 28-yard touchdown pass to Alworth on busted coverage late in the quarter, nothing was going right – for him or the team. Dallas headed into the break trailing 21-13, a score that looked better than it felt.
“We can’t do anything correctly,” Hill says. “It’s almost like we were still asleep. Nothing seemed to be going well.”
Landry was collected in the locker room. Waters remembers only one thing out of the ordinary: Rather than split halftime evenly between both sides of the ball, as was his custom, the head coach spent the entirety of it with the defense. Otherwise, the message was classic Landry – direct and even-keeled.
“He never tried to fire you up or anything,” Waters says. “It was just as boring as the day is long, but he was absolutely right on. ‘We know our game plan. We know how to play it. We know we can beat these guys. Let’s go out and execute our game plan.’”
Only, the Cowboys couldn’t. Lilly was unable to continue in the second half – “I was half-knocked out,” he says – leaving both sides of the ball without their leaders. The team appeared as rudderless as before in the third quarter. Morton threw another pick – a deflection off receiver Billy Parks’ hands – and Hill once again fumbled, this time turning it over to San Francisco.
“Their defense was actually yelling at us: ‘We’ve got you now, you sons of guns,’” Hill says, pausing to issue a minor correction: “They weren’t saying it that nicely.”
Schreiber tacked on a third 1-yard touchdown midway through the quarter, and that appeared to be the death blow. Dallas trailed 28-13 with 20 minutes remaining, a sizable margin in an era before downfield passing became de rigueur and pass interference calls more rigorous
“Generally, you’re mentally telling yourself there’s a chance we can win, but I haven’t really been part of games where it was just the sudden miraculous victory up to that point,” Cole says.
There just wasn’t much reason for hope, not with Morton so far off his game in what would be his final start as a Cowboy. Late in the third quarter, he’d completed eight of 21 passes for 96 yards with three total turnovers.
That’s when Landry decided it was time to make a change. [HR][/HR]
When the San Francisco game kicked off, the Cowboys were about 13 months removed from the unfamiliar, uncomfortable position of watching their head coach struggle to make a decision.
Landry spent the first half of the 1971 campaign agonizing over whether Morton or Staubach should be his starting quarterback. The former had bided his time behind Don Meredith, earned his chance and looked every bit the part of a prototypical pocket passer. The latter was, well, Roger Staubach. Landry’s initial solution was to not choose at all: Morton and Staubach alternated starts the first seven weeks of the season, with the designated second-string quarterback generally taking a healthy number of snaps rather than merely carrying a clipboard.
But the indecision took its toll, both in the standings – Dallas was 4-3 after seven games – as well as in the locker room. Finally, the team captains requested a meeting with their head coach ahead of the Week 8 game against the St. Louis Cardinals.
“We went in and told Coach Landry that we needed him to make a choice on quarterbacks, and we didn’t say which one,” says Lilly. “We just needed a quarterback because he is the leader of the team, basically.”
Later that week, Landry formally awarded the job to Staubach. Dallas would not lose another game that season.
“He said we needed to have one quarterback. I think he’d known that for quite a while, but he probably just needed us to tell him,” Lilly says with a laugh.
What Landry also probably knew was this: While his captains refused to back one player over the other, the team wanted Staubach. They simply believed in him, whether it was due to the added mobility, the better ball management or those already evident intangibles.
Which is why, Waters says, the momentum began to shift in Dallas’ favor “the instant” Staubach came on for Morton late in the third quarter against San Francisco with the Cowboys trailing by 15 points. “There was no question about it,” he says.
It would take several possessions for the scoreboard to reflect it. Staubach fumbled and turned the ball over on his first series, catching a break when the 49ers’ Bruce Gossett missed a 32-yard field goal that would have pushed the advantage to 18. He could only lead Dallas to a field goal on his second, a drive that was largely by a 48-yard draw play by Hill. On the third, he was sacked on third down – the fourth sack he’d taken in less than a quarter on the field. Dallas punted.
There were only two minutes left on the clock when Staubach got the ball back for his fourth series. That’s when Captain Comeback emerged.
Within 30 seconds, Staubach connected with Parks on an inside post for a 20-yard touchdown to cut the deficit to 28-23. There was hope, at last. Still, Dallas trailed by five with just 90 seconds remaining. The Cowboys would need a miracle in the form of an onside kick recovery to stay in the game. Then, they’d need another from Staubach to somehow win it.
It was on Toni Fritsch, the Cowboys’ Austrian kicker, to deliver the first half. At 27 years old, Fritsch was already in the midst of a second professional career: He spent nine years as a striker with Rapid Wien, Austria’s most dominant soccer club, and earned nine caps with the Austrian national team prior to arriving in the United States to take up football in 1971. He remains the only man in history to win championships in both professional soccer as well as the NFL.
That dual-sport background provided Fritsch with an uncommonly deep bag of tricks. One, in particular, transfixed his Cowboy teammates. In soccer, it’s called the “rabona,” in which a player essentially kicks with his legs crossed by wrapping his kicking leg behind his standing leg. It’s an exotic, skillful trick that was unheard of in football, but Fritsch had begun workshopping it on kickoffs in practice ever since he’d arrived in Dallas. Now, with the Cowboys in dire straits, it was time to see whether Fritsch’s unusual experiment could succeed in a live game.
“We all talked Coach Landry into doing that,” Lilly says. “We had nothing to lose, really … So it was one of those times when you think, ‘Well, this might work.’”
It did. Fritsch trotted a half-step past the football, then whipped his right heel into its side to send the ball flying to the right. Somehow, San Francisco saw it coming, but the ball ricocheted off 49ers receiver Preston Riley’s chest and Cowboys safety Mel Renfro pounced on the rebound. That set Staubach up at midfield, and he needed only three plays to finish the job. First, he flashed his trademark mobility and scrambled for 21 yards up the middle. Then, he hit Parks on an out route to set up first and goal from the 10. Finally, with 56 seconds left, Staubach squeezed a ball to Ron Sellers in the middle of the end zone to give Dallas its first lead of the game at 30-28.
It left Brodie with enough time to sneak San Francisco into field goal range, but Waters intercepted him a second time to snuff out any flicker of a comeback. It was over. Dallas eliminated San Francisco from the postseason in the exact way the 49ers had made it there one week earlier. In just over a quarter of work, Staubach had completed 12 of 20 passes for 174 yards and two touchdowns.
The sideline erupted. The Cowboys hollered and backslapped and leapt into the air. They hugged Lilly, the one player not jumping for joy on account of his bad back. Cole and Alworth went so far as to plop to the ground and barrel roll up and down the field in aimless delight.
“We both looked at each other, and it’s like we didn’t know what to do,” Cole says. “Do you hit another guy? You don’t really hit them because you’re happy. Just something to let off the energy and roll down and celebrate. Because it was so unexpected.”
Even the normally stoic Landry was beaming. “It’s the best comeback we’ve had since I’ve been in Dallas,” he told the Associated Press after the game. Dallas would lose the following weekend to Washington in the NFC Championship game, but Staubach would go on to engineer so many more late-game heroics, from the 1975 Hail Mary to Drew Pearson against Minnesota to the season finale thriller against Washington in 1979. The legend of Captain Comeback was born that day, and at least one of Staubach’s teammates believes the San Francisco game still represents his finest late-game work.
“He won a heck of a lot of regular-season games with comebacks and our defense would help him and all that kind of stuff,” Waters says, “But this one was against a team that had beaten us that year – this great little story behind all that stuff. I can’t imagine anything being any better than that particular game.”
But whether it was the very best or simply among them, the ranking matters far less than what became an indelible sentiment. The rest of the world had found out what his teammates already suspected: Nothing was ever impossible with Roger Staubach under center.
“When we’d go out there, we’d say, ‘It’s not over ’til it’s over,’” Lilly says. “If we were down, just like we were in San Francisco – pretty far down – we’ve got Roger back there. All we’ve got to do is get the ball. We’ve got to get the ball, not give up any points when we were down, and Roger can bring us back.
“And he did. Over and over.”
By Mike Piellucci 2h ago
19 in ’19 highlights the 19 most impactful Cowboys, Rangers, Mavericks and Stars throughout the history of each franchise. Our staff voted on the top 19 from all four combined lists to create these overall rankings. You can find all of our team lists and profiles here.
Looking back, it seems impossible. Perhaps it should have been.
How could anyone conceive of a scenario quite like the one on Dec. 23, 1972: Roger Staubach coming off the bench ice-cold in a road playoff game, having thrown only 20 passes all season, then tossing two touchdowns with less than 90 seconds remaining to defeat the Cowboys’ archrivals?
Somehow, it happened – because the most clutch athlete in Dallas history made it so.
Roger Staubach is far more than the sum of his late-game heroics. He is one of the most decorated football players of all time, a Heisman winner and national champion runner-up in college turned two-time Super Bowl winner and All-Decade teamer in the pros, as well as a Hall of Famer at both levels. He is an American icon who commanded 130 soldiers in the Vietnam War and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom just last year. He is a Dallas luminary, a walking blueprint for how to embody the city during a playing career and then bloom alongside it in retirement. No amount of words poured onto the page could encapsulate the depth of his impact. It is indescribable.
But if there is one area that begins to encapsulate everything – his skill and his success and his significance – it’s Staubach’s precision when the chips were down. He authored 23 game-winning drives over his career, 17 of which came with less than two minutes remaining in regulation or in overtime. His nickname practically wrote itself: “Captain Comeback.”
The moniker was born from one game in particular, a heated postseason matchup against the San Francisco 49ers. It created a legacy that transcended his impressive statistics and championships. It canonized him as the ultimate winner and the ultimate athlete to believe in – not only for everyone watching, but for the men who lined up with him every week for more than a decade.
“There wasn’t anything that really set him apart until that game,” says defensive lineman Larry Cole, Staubach’s teammate for his entire career. “That’s when it was different, and the feeling of the team was different … That was the first time we became believers that, (with) Roger Staubach, we’d always be in the game if we were playing up to snuff.” [HR][/HR]
But, how?
Or, more precisely, why? Why was Staubach – who played his first NFL game at age 27, who had exactly one regular season’s worth of starts under his belt by his 30[SUP]th[/SUP] birthday, who didn’t even have the starting job to himself until midway through the year he won his first Super Bowl – so adept at staging comeback after comeback after comeback in the fires of the fourth quarter, the time of game in which even the most seasoned quarterbacks can crumble?
Theories abound. There were his natural gifts, in particular the sort of scrambling ability that kept plays alive in an era long before mobile quarterbacks became ubiquitous. There was also the matter of Tom Landry, whose hard-nosed tactics forged mentally tough teams.
“I like to say he was through the pressure cooker of Tom Landry,” says running back Calvin Hill, Staubach’s teammate from 1969 through 1974. “Tom Landry, by the time you got through with his camps — and even in the season, his practices, his skull sessions — you’re either with him or you didn’t (make it).”
Yet Staubach was hardly the only dual-threat quarterback the game has seen, nor was he Landry’s only starting quarterback. The things that truly distinguished Staubach were personal to him.
Naturally, that began with his military background. The Naval Academy first taught Staubach how to follow orders, helping him empathize with the rank and file. Then, it molded him into a leader, with dozens of men entrusting their lives to him. Of course, he had leadership skills well beyond that of the average football player. Besides, Hill says, “He was around combat. I kind of think, whether it’s the fourth quarter or fourth and 1, that’s not the same as being in Vietnam. That’s real stress. That’s real pressure.”
Yet Bob Lilly, Staubach’s teammate from 1969 through 1974 and the Cowboys’ defensive heartbeat, insists that Staubach’s magnetism went far beyond what was drilled into him. “I think he was born with it as well,” Lilly says.
Staubach led in small ways, through tiny gestures. The former military commander would jokingly prod his teammates to go to the next station at practice instead of barking orders at them. If a receiver muffed a catch, he blamed his own throw instead – it was too high, he’d insist, or a touch behind. Prior to joining the Cowboys full time, Staubach used his military leave in 1968 to attend rookie training camp. Consequently, his teammates were inclined to treat him as a veteran when he joined the team full-time the following year, inviting him to join them out on the town during off nights in training camp instead of spending them with other first-year players, who were forbidden from taking part. Staubach refused, choosing instead to hang out with his fellow rookies at a second-rate pizza joint, then catch a second-run movie with them.
But he also led by modeling so many virtues the sport is built upon. Nobody worked harder, from the marathon film sessions with Landry to countless hours after practices begging anyone in earshot – even defensive linemen like Lilly – to run extra routes for him. He was so competitive that he insisted on leading every pre-practice warmup lap, going so far as to race anyone who tried to get ahead of him. Sometimes, he was too tough for his own good: Staubach missed almost the entirety of the 1972 regular season with a shoulder injury after colliding with Rams linebacker Marlin McKeever in a preseason game to fight for extra yards. It was a reckless, ultimately harmful idea – yet his teammates couldn’t help but be impressed.
“When people do that and you’re playing next to them, you go, ‘Well, shit. I better work pretty hard here, too, because I don’t want to be the loose cog in the wheel,” Cole says.
All of it converged to create something ineffable, a sorcery that made Staubach greater than the sum of his already considerable parts.
“I was going to say he could be a better running back than quarterback, but I don’t think so,” says Charlie Waters, who played with Staubach from 1970 through 1979. “Because there’s so much to quarterback than just calling the play in the huddle and finding the wide receiver or throwing the nice pass out there. It’s the leader of the team. It’s, ‘As the quarterback goes, so goes the team.’”
And on a chilly December afternoon in Candlestick Park, Staubach’s team needed him to rescue them from what seemed like certain defeat. [HR][/HR]
Their most famous battle occurred in the 1980s, and they dominated the NFC in the 1990s, but the Cowboys and 49ers’ rivalry truly began in the early 1970s with a trio of consecutive playoff games.
First, Dallas edged San Francisco 17-10 in the 1970 NFC Championship game at Kezar Stadium to reach Super Bowl V, the first Super Bowl in franchise history. (They ultimately lost to Baltimore, 16-13.) The Cowboys then bested the 49ers again the following year in Dallas, defeating San Francisco 14-3 to book a trip to Super Bowl VI. (Dallas emerged victorious, demolishing Miami 24-3 to claim the first of its five championships.)
The third matchup came in the opening round of the 1972 playoffs. This time, San Francisco had ample reason for confidence. Exactly one month earlier, the 49ers obliterated Dallas 31-10 in Texas Stadium. It was the Cowboys’ worst loss of the regular season, narrowly edging a 20-point defeat by the New York Giants in the regular-season finale that took place just one week prior to their rematch.
San Francisco had the momentum, in other words, as well as a health advantage. Staubach’s game-readiness was an open question: He returned from his shoulder injury in Week 10 but had only played in spot duty in the four games since. The most passes he threw in any one game was nine. Meanwhile, San Francisco’s quarterback, 1970 NFL MVP John Brodie, had returned from his own long-term injury the week prior, coming off the bench in the regular-season finale to throw two touchdowns and send the 49ers to the postseason with a 20-17 victory over Minnesota. On top of that, Staubach wasn’t even the biggest injury concern on Dallas’ roster — Lilly was. The 10-time Pro Bowl defensive tackle was battling a back injury severe enough to require a three-night hospital stay earlier in the week and multiple Novocain injections to make it onto the field.
No head coach was better equipped to exploit those advantages than San Francisco’s Dick Nolan, a former Landry lieutenant who served as the Cowboys’ defensive coordinator from 1962 through 1967 before taking over the 49ers in 1968.
“He knew Tom’s system as well as anybody in the league did,” says tight end Billy Truax, who played with Staubach from 1971 through 1973. “They had a little edge there as far as preparation.”
Immediately, it showed: San Francisco’s Vic Washington ran back the opening kick to stake the 49ers to an early 7-0 lead just 17 seconds into the game. It was the first kickoff returned for a touchdown against Dallas since 1966. The opening bell had only just rung, and already the challenger had stunned the champion.
“It seemed like before we could even sit down on offense,” says running back Calvin Hill. “We couldn’t even get our bearings.”
It would get worse from there. Brodie had San Francisco’s offense humming in the second quarter, marching the 49ers down the field to set up a pair of 1-yard touchdown runs by running back Larry Schreiber. Just about his only misstep came on a botched flea flicker, which Waters picked off at the Cowboys’ 1-yard line to thwart another San Francisco drive in Dallas territory.
“Most defensive guys go chasing after the run play,” Waters says. “Because I was a quarterback in college, I knew exactly what the play was right when they were doing it. I didn’t get faked out.”
It hardly seemed to matter, though, because Dallas couldn’t get untracked on offense. In particular, that meant Craig Morton, Staubach’s understudy and the former heir apparent to Don Meredith. On paper, Morton was the Platonic ideal of a quarterback, 6-foot-4 with a howitzer arm and a keen understanding of reading defenses. He was also effective, having stewarded Dallas to a 10-4 regular season with Staubach sidelined.
But Morton lacked Staubach’s elusiveness, a byproduct of two chronically bad knees. And, more damningly, he turned the ball over – he had thrown 21 interceptions against only 15 touchdowns that season. Both were on full display against San Francisco. Morton was sacked only once but crucially slipped and eventually fumbled in the second quarter to set up Schreiber’s first touchdown. On the very next possession, he threw an interception that led to Schreiber’s second. Morton wasn’t the only one struggling; Hill recorded a fumble of his own, which was recovered by Cowboys receiver Lance Alworth. But Morton was the offense’s engine, and he was sputtering. Apart from a 28-yard touchdown pass to Alworth on busted coverage late in the quarter, nothing was going right – for him or the team. Dallas headed into the break trailing 21-13, a score that looked better than it felt.
“We can’t do anything correctly,” Hill says. “It’s almost like we were still asleep. Nothing seemed to be going well.”
Landry was collected in the locker room. Waters remembers only one thing out of the ordinary: Rather than split halftime evenly between both sides of the ball, as was his custom, the head coach spent the entirety of it with the defense. Otherwise, the message was classic Landry – direct and even-keeled.
“He never tried to fire you up or anything,” Waters says. “It was just as boring as the day is long, but he was absolutely right on. ‘We know our game plan. We know how to play it. We know we can beat these guys. Let’s go out and execute our game plan.’”
Only, the Cowboys couldn’t. Lilly was unable to continue in the second half – “I was half-knocked out,” he says – leaving both sides of the ball without their leaders. The team appeared as rudderless as before in the third quarter. Morton threw another pick – a deflection off receiver Billy Parks’ hands – and Hill once again fumbled, this time turning it over to San Francisco.
“Their defense was actually yelling at us: ‘We’ve got you now, you sons of guns,’” Hill says, pausing to issue a minor correction: “They weren’t saying it that nicely.”
Schreiber tacked on a third 1-yard touchdown midway through the quarter, and that appeared to be the death blow. Dallas trailed 28-13 with 20 minutes remaining, a sizable margin in an era before downfield passing became de rigueur and pass interference calls more rigorous
“Generally, you’re mentally telling yourself there’s a chance we can win, but I haven’t really been part of games where it was just the sudden miraculous victory up to that point,” Cole says.
There just wasn’t much reason for hope, not with Morton so far off his game in what would be his final start as a Cowboy. Late in the third quarter, he’d completed eight of 21 passes for 96 yards with three total turnovers.
That’s when Landry decided it was time to make a change. [HR][/HR]
When the San Francisco game kicked off, the Cowboys were about 13 months removed from the unfamiliar, uncomfortable position of watching their head coach struggle to make a decision.
Landry spent the first half of the 1971 campaign agonizing over whether Morton or Staubach should be his starting quarterback. The former had bided his time behind Don Meredith, earned his chance and looked every bit the part of a prototypical pocket passer. The latter was, well, Roger Staubach. Landry’s initial solution was to not choose at all: Morton and Staubach alternated starts the first seven weeks of the season, with the designated second-string quarterback generally taking a healthy number of snaps rather than merely carrying a clipboard.
But the indecision took its toll, both in the standings – Dallas was 4-3 after seven games – as well as in the locker room. Finally, the team captains requested a meeting with their head coach ahead of the Week 8 game against the St. Louis Cardinals.
“We went in and told Coach Landry that we needed him to make a choice on quarterbacks, and we didn’t say which one,” says Lilly. “We just needed a quarterback because he is the leader of the team, basically.”
Later that week, Landry formally awarded the job to Staubach. Dallas would not lose another game that season.
“He said we needed to have one quarterback. I think he’d known that for quite a while, but he probably just needed us to tell him,” Lilly says with a laugh.
What Landry also probably knew was this: While his captains refused to back one player over the other, the team wanted Staubach. They simply believed in him, whether it was due to the added mobility, the better ball management or those already evident intangibles.
Which is why, Waters says, the momentum began to shift in Dallas’ favor “the instant” Staubach came on for Morton late in the third quarter against San Francisco with the Cowboys trailing by 15 points. “There was no question about it,” he says.
It would take several possessions for the scoreboard to reflect it. Staubach fumbled and turned the ball over on his first series, catching a break when the 49ers’ Bruce Gossett missed a 32-yard field goal that would have pushed the advantage to 18. He could only lead Dallas to a field goal on his second, a drive that was largely by a 48-yard draw play by Hill. On the third, he was sacked on third down – the fourth sack he’d taken in less than a quarter on the field. Dallas punted.
There were only two minutes left on the clock when Staubach got the ball back for his fourth series. That’s when Captain Comeback emerged.
Within 30 seconds, Staubach connected with Parks on an inside post for a 20-yard touchdown to cut the deficit to 28-23. There was hope, at last. Still, Dallas trailed by five with just 90 seconds remaining. The Cowboys would need a miracle in the form of an onside kick recovery to stay in the game. Then, they’d need another from Staubach to somehow win it.
It was on Toni Fritsch, the Cowboys’ Austrian kicker, to deliver the first half. At 27 years old, Fritsch was already in the midst of a second professional career: He spent nine years as a striker with Rapid Wien, Austria’s most dominant soccer club, and earned nine caps with the Austrian national team prior to arriving in the United States to take up football in 1971. He remains the only man in history to win championships in both professional soccer as well as the NFL.
That dual-sport background provided Fritsch with an uncommonly deep bag of tricks. One, in particular, transfixed his Cowboy teammates. In soccer, it’s called the “rabona,” in which a player essentially kicks with his legs crossed by wrapping his kicking leg behind his standing leg. It’s an exotic, skillful trick that was unheard of in football, but Fritsch had begun workshopping it on kickoffs in practice ever since he’d arrived in Dallas. Now, with the Cowboys in dire straits, it was time to see whether Fritsch’s unusual experiment could succeed in a live game.
“We all talked Coach Landry into doing that,” Lilly says. “We had nothing to lose, really … So it was one of those times when you think, ‘Well, this might work.’”
It did. Fritsch trotted a half-step past the football, then whipped his right heel into its side to send the ball flying to the right. Somehow, San Francisco saw it coming, but the ball ricocheted off 49ers receiver Preston Riley’s chest and Cowboys safety Mel Renfro pounced on the rebound. That set Staubach up at midfield, and he needed only three plays to finish the job. First, he flashed his trademark mobility and scrambled for 21 yards up the middle. Then, he hit Parks on an out route to set up first and goal from the 10. Finally, with 56 seconds left, Staubach squeezed a ball to Ron Sellers in the middle of the end zone to give Dallas its first lead of the game at 30-28.
It left Brodie with enough time to sneak San Francisco into field goal range, but Waters intercepted him a second time to snuff out any flicker of a comeback. It was over. Dallas eliminated San Francisco from the postseason in the exact way the 49ers had made it there one week earlier. In just over a quarter of work, Staubach had completed 12 of 20 passes for 174 yards and two touchdowns.
The sideline erupted. The Cowboys hollered and backslapped and leapt into the air. They hugged Lilly, the one player not jumping for joy on account of his bad back. Cole and Alworth went so far as to plop to the ground and barrel roll up and down the field in aimless delight.
“We both looked at each other, and it’s like we didn’t know what to do,” Cole says. “Do you hit another guy? You don’t really hit them because you’re happy. Just something to let off the energy and roll down and celebrate. Because it was so unexpected.”
Even the normally stoic Landry was beaming. “It’s the best comeback we’ve had since I’ve been in Dallas,” he told the Associated Press after the game. Dallas would lose the following weekend to Washington in the NFC Championship game, but Staubach would go on to engineer so many more late-game heroics, from the 1975 Hail Mary to Drew Pearson against Minnesota to the season finale thriller against Washington in 1979. The legend of Captain Comeback was born that day, and at least one of Staubach’s teammates believes the San Francisco game still represents his finest late-game work.
“He won a heck of a lot of regular-season games with comebacks and our defense would help him and all that kind of stuff,” Waters says, “But this one was against a team that had beaten us that year – this great little story behind all that stuff. I can’t imagine anything being any better than that particular game.”
But whether it was the very best or simply among them, the ranking matters far less than what became an indelible sentiment. The rest of the world had found out what his teammates already suspected: Nothing was ever impossible with Roger Staubach under center.
“When we’d go out there, we’d say, ‘It’s not over ’til it’s over,’” Lilly says. “If we were down, just like we were in San Francisco – pretty far down – we’ve got Roger back there. All we’ve got to do is get the ball. We’ve got to get the ball, not give up any points when we were down, and Roger can bring us back.
“And he did. Over and over.”
