Tebow can't be just a gimmick

NY clearly planning a platoon system, which hasn't worked for teams in past

Mark J. Terrill / AP

Matt Leinart, left, and Kurt Warner were in one of the few platoon systems that eventually worked out.

ANALYSIS

updated 11:09 p.m. ET March 27, 2012

Mike Tanier

If the Jets really plan to have Tim Tebow take 20 snaps per game, as Rex Ryan said earlier this week, then they won?t be creating a Wildcat package or some specialized role, but a quarterback platoon. A typical team runs 64 offense plays per game. If one quarterback executes one-third of them, he is a co-starter, not an occasional substitute.

Quarterback platoons have a long and sometimes ridiculous history in the NFL. Platoons nearly always cause bad feelings and confusion. Platoon arrangements have typically been abandoned to the junk yard of terrible ideas after just few games.

But here?s the crazy part: a lot of them worked. Well, sort of.

Some of the greatest quarterbacks in history have been stuck in platoons, and several teams have taken the two-quarterback shuffle all the way to the championship game or Super Bowl.

Here?s a rundown of some of the most infamous platoons in football history, and how the teams that implemented them fared. To clarify, these are not quarterback controversies, but arrangements where two (or three) quarterbacks were expected to share in-game duties. In many cases, the operation was a tragic failure, yet somehow the patient went on to a happy life.

The Marlboro Man and the probe
From 1955 through 1958, the Giants often started games with Don Heinrich under center. Heinrich ?probed the defense? for weaknesses (the phrase is used so often in connection with Heinrich that it is hard to hear his name and not think of some unpleasant device), then switched to their real starter, Charlie Conerly. Neither quarterback liked the arrangement, and Heinrich was slowly phased out, but not before starting the 1956 NFL championship game, doing some exquisitely invasive first-quarter probing of the Bears, and handing Chuckin? Charlie a 13-0 lead that became a 47-7 rout.

Heinrich drifted out of the league, but not before compiling a 20-12-2 record as a ?starter.? Conerly went on to portray the Marlboro Man in cigarette ads, and was a Hall of Fame finalist for years.

Oh, and the long-forgotten eccentric goofball who helped create? a crazy scheme that left the Marlboro Man on the bench for 25 percent of the game? Offensive coordinator Vince Lombardi.

The three-headed monstrosity
Joe Kuharich is remembered as the worst coach in Eagles history, which is saying something. In 1966, Kuharich hatched the looniest scheme of his unpredictable career. Every week, Norm Snead, King Hill, and Jack Concannon took turns practicing with the starting offense. Kuharich then decided on his starting quarterback on Sunday, sometimes not making up his mind until the Eagles got possession of the football. ?It became a joke around the league,? Hill is quoted as saying in The Eagles Encyclopedia, ?but the three of us weren?t laughing.?

None of the three quarterbacks played particularly well, but the Eagles finished with a 9-5 record, their only winning season between 1961 and 1978. Kuharich abandoned the system in 1967, and the Eagles sank back into the basement.

Captain America calling
Tom Landry was on the 1956 Giants coaching staff, and he must have been taking notes. What else can explain his thinking when he juggled Roger Staubach and Craig Morton at the start of the 1971 season? Morton started the season, but Staubach?s playing time steadily increased to the point where the quarterbacks were alternating on a play-by-play basis. That experiment, not surprisingly, failed miserably, and Staubach more-or-less demanded the starting job.

The Cowboys won 10 straight games, including two playoff games and the Super Bowl, once Landry stopped playing the switcheroo. In 1972, Staubach suffered a shoulder injury, and Morton came off the bench to lead the Cowboys to a 10-4 record, just to show there were no hard feelings.

The WoodStrock festival
After Bob Griese retired, Don Shula?s Dolphins were left with two quarterbacks: David Woodley, an athletic youngster who made dubious decisions, and Don Strock, the dependable veteran who backed up Griese for years. Shula decided he could have the best of both worlds if he used Woodley as his starter, then pulled Strock from the bullpen if he needed a cooler hand at the end of a game. Thus, WoodStrock was born.

Strock engineered five fourth-quarter comebacks between 1980 and 1982, according to Scott Kacsmar?s research for Pro Football Reference. Those comebacks helped the Dolphins reach the playoffs in 1981 and the Super Bowl in strike-shortened 1982. They also masked some of Woodley?s liabilities as a quarterback, though Shula was not really fooled -- he drafted Dan Marino in 1983.

Poor Randall Cunningham
A coach named Ryan? A scatter-armed scrambler? Where have we seen this before? In 1986, Eagles coach Buddy Ryan concocted a hare-brained scheme to use Randall Cunningham as a third-and-long specialist in relief of veteran starter Ron Jaworski. Unfortunately, Ryan did not bother to assemble an offensive line or running game. So after a combination of sacks, holding penalties, and doomed running plays, Cunningham usually jogged onto the field on third down and 20-something. Folks in Philadelphia can still close their eyes and head radio broadcaster Merrill Reece bellow ?poor Randall Cunningham? as the barely-coached second-year scrambler stepped to the line.

Cunningham juked and jived for a few first downs in his role. But mostly, he got sacked: an uncanny 79 times in 209 pass attempts, many of them after the platoon was mercy-killed and he took over as starter. The Eagles endured 104 sacks that year, a record which may never be broken.

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Source: http://nbcsports.msnbc.com/id/46868989/ns/sports-nfl/

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