Roger Staubach Case Study

Roger staubach a 10th-round draft choice. That's the first thing. It speaks to the reality laughable in retrospect, fair at the time -- that future Hall of Famer Roger Staubach was considered a genuine risk for any NFL front office. Staubach was a roll of the dice.And no, there were no positional concerns. This wasn't an Eric Crouch kind of a thing, or people wondering whether Andre Ware's game could translate one level up. Staubach was a Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback for Navy, and no one was suggesting he would have trouble playing QB in The League. By consensus, really, it was strictly a question of good versus great.
So why did Staubach fall and fall, to the point that he was still on the big board by the time of the 1964 draft's 10th

Staubach, at the time, still owed the Navy five years; it was the deal he made when he accepted his appointment to the Naval Academy .The deal all Annapolis attendees made. Not only would he serve; he was a fair shot to pull a tour of duty. It was the 1960s, and it was real life.And thus, the Dallas Cowboys were very possibly just burning their 10th-round pick on this guy with the elite college record and the pro handicap. By the time Staubach was scheduled to return from the Navy, he would be a 27-year-old rookie. The NFL wasn't exactly teeming with such.In the end, coach Tom Landry and president/GM Tex Schramm forged ahead with their best guess. They signed Staubach to what amounted to a "futures" contract -- as the story has it, Schramm wrote the details on a legal pad during a meeting with Staubach at a hotel -- the gist of which was that he would work out with the Cowboys during his leaves from the Navy, and when Staubach resigned his commission in 1969, Dallas would be his team Best futures contract in NFL history featuring notes and doodles hand-scrawled by a team executive? I am inclined to say probably so.If you're of a certain age, Roger Staubach is front and center in some of the greatest memories of a golden era of Cowboys football, years in which the marketing slogan "America's Team" felt like it actually might apply. Some of us grew up thinking that every Dallas team was this good, because when Roger played, the Cowboys pretty much always