The best quarterback you never heard of

If you are a football fan, sit back and read this little story. It’s about the way life works and, maybe, the way life doesn’t work sometimes. It’s about making lemonade out of lemons and it’s about the vague paths of chance.

Be careful. It’s also about banging your head against a wall as you ask yourself, “Why? Why? Why?”

The year was 1994. The National Football League held its annual draft of college football players, looking for the next great crop of NFL stars. The draft was limited to seven rounds and there were 222 selections made. Among those drafted very early was future Hall of Famer Marshall Faulk of (ahem) San Diego State University. Faulk was selected by the Indianapolis Colts and finished his career with the St. Louis Rams, where he was on a Super Bowl championship team.

Each year, NFL teams spend a bundle on analyzing college players. They send out scouts to watch players and the scouts look at endless hours of video. Finally, the league holds a dog and pony show named the NFL Combine each year as the top draft candidates are brought to one location (lately it’s been in Indianapolis) for scouts and coaches from every team to observe. The draft is not an exact science and sometimes players with tremendous potential slip through the cracks.

In 1994, quarterbacks slipped through some darn wide cracks. If you figure the Grand Canyon is kinda wide.

To be sure, a few quarterbacks drafted that year had very fine NFL careers. Heath Shuler, Trent Dilfer and Gus Frerotte were drafted in ’94. So were Perry Klein, Doug Nussmeier, Jim Miller, Jay Walker, Steve Mathews and Glenn Foley.

Know who wasn’t drafted that year? Kurt Warner, a future NFL MVP and Super Bowl champ with Faulk and the Rams. Another really outstanding future NFL quarterback who got less credit than he deserved, Jeff Garcia, was not drafted. Also among the quarterbacks not drafted by an NFL team in 1994 was one Anthony Calvillo of Utah State.

So who is Anthony Calvillo? Well, let me tell you, they know the guy up in Canada. As of this writing, Calvillo has become the all-time leader in touchdown passes in the Canadian Football League with 396. Now in his 18^th season, Calvillo has thrown 10 scoring passes and completed passes for 1,129 yards in the first four games of this season. He does not appear to be slowing down much. He is on pace to become the CFL’s all time leader in passing yards this year. He has played on Grey Cup winners (the CFL title game is the Grey Cup) and, generally, has had a heckuva career. Make that a great career.

There is a Canadian football hall of fame and he’ll be in it someday. He should be inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio, but the HoF voters there sometimes skip over a guy like Calvillo.

That is what the scouts did in 1994. They missed Calvillo. How did the scouts miss Calvillo all those years ago? Who knows? He stands an inch over six feet in height, so the scouts might have judged him to be too short. He played junior college ball here in California before playing at Utah State, but his numbers as a college junior and senior should have gotten him some notice. He played in a minor bowl game as a senior, so the scouts had a chance to see him. Utah State did not get much attention back in the 90s, but neither did Idaho and that’s where Nussmeier played.

The scouts worked overtime that year, as they always do. They didn’t miss Howard’s Walker or C.W. Post’s Klein, that’s for sure. Foley, of Boston College, was the 208^th player selected by NFL teams in 1994. All told, nine quarterbacks were drafted by NFL clubs in 1994, all judged to be better prospects than Anthony Calvillo, Kurt Warner or Jeff Garcia.

Garcia made the move to the CFL where he played well enough to earn a chance with the NFL’s San Francisco 49ers. He eventually played for several NFL teams. Warner was in some NFL pre-season camps, played in the Arena league and then in NFL Europe before he finally got a chance with the Rams.

Calvillo has outlasted every quarterback drafted by NFL teams in ’94, not to mention Garcia and Warner. Calvillo will pretty much own the passing pages of the CFL record book when he finally quits playing. He’s probably the best quarterback you’ve never heard of. But don’t feel bad. After all, he wasn’t even drafted.

Thanks for reading.