Gold Jacket Spotlight: The Idol of Other Idols, Roger Staubach

In 1992, Steve Young won the National Football League’s Most Valuable Player award after leading the league in numerous passing statistics and guiding the San Francisco 49ers to a league-best 14-2 record.

Ask him what he remembers about that season, however, and it’s likely he will recall it as the year he finally got to meet his idol. And that he nearly became unraveled.

Roger Staubach, who this week steps into the Gold Jacket Spotlight, had that effect for decades, not only on youngsters but also on 30-year-old seasoned professionals.

“I loved Roger Staubach. I wanted to talk like him and run like him,” Young told NFL Films. “He was a hero in a way that you don’t ever meet a hero or know a hero. They’re the guy that’s on your wall. They’re not real.

“And the first time I ever met him was the ’92 (NFC) Championship Game when I went out to midfield for the coin toss. There’s Roger Staubach, the honorary captain. And to this day I wonder if Jimmy Johnson somehow knew that this would just throw me for a loop, which it did. I was like, ‘My hero. My hero.’ [He said to Roger,] ‘I gotta go play, but … could we talk later?’ It was just this awkward thing at midfield.”

Young passed for 313 yards and a touchdown that afternoon, but he also threw two interceptions as the Cowboys prevailed 30-20 on their way to winning Super Bowl XXVII.

Fellow Hall of Fame quarterbacks John Elway, Brett Favre, Joe Namath and Kurt Warner and countless other teammates and opponents have spoken glowingly of Roger over the years.

Elway recalled attending a camp where “I got an autograph from him. He definitely was my idol.” He said that as a teenager he knew “what I was going to do in my future, and that was I was going to be the next Roger Staubach.”

Roger influenced a much younger Warner, who said watching him lead the Cowboys in Super Bowl XII was “how I fell in love with the game” as a 6-year-old.

Namath said he made an effort to watch games or film involving three Hall of Fame quarterbacks he admired: Otto Graham, Bobby Layne and Roger Staubach.

Upon his election to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2016, Favre said one reason the honor meant so much to him was because he could meet and “be on the same team” as his boyhood idol.

Roger was elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility with a resume that included not only impressive statistics but also the leadership intangibles that distinguished him from his peers.

No deficit seemed too large for the Cowboys to overcome with Roger behind center. He is credited with 23 game-winning drives and 15 fourth-quarter comebacks, none more famous than the “Hail Mary” pass to Drew Pearson in the final seconds of a 1975 divisional playoff game in Minnesota that gave the Cowboys a 17-14 win.

That 1975 season ended with an appearance in Super Bowl X, one of five Super Bowls in Roger’s 11-year pro career. He won twice and was named MVP of Super Bowl VI.

His career totals included 22,700 passing yards and 153 touchdowns. He led the league in passer rating four times and retired as the career leader in that statistic.

The winner of the 1971 Bert Bell Award winner and the 1978 NFL Walter Payton Man of the Year, Roger also was elected as a member of the NFL’s All-Decade Team of the 1970s and to the NFL 100 All-Time Team.

“All of us quarterbacks who have come in since Roger, we’ve been playing catch-up,” Hall of Famer Troy Aikman told NFL Films. “We’re trying to live up to an image and to a position that he helped create.”