Sometimes the Best Trades are the Ones Not Made

 By John Turney 

John Ralston

The day before the Jets' second game of 1976 the club agreed to trade Joe Namath to the Denver Broncos. 

A trade that was never consummated.

In the very early Spring of that year, Namath had requested a trade to the Los Angeles Rams but it was reported by Dave Anderson of the New York Times that Rams owner Carroll Rosenbloom was not willing to pay the Jets' asking price or pay Namath's $450,000 salary so that deal went nowhere.

The Jets had Lou Holtz, a rookie coach, and a number one draft choice in Richard Todd, and a new offense that would feature some aspects of an option running game that Namath was ill-suited to. Namath not only had bad knees he had a hamstring injury that had nagged him for a couple of years.

Meanwhile, the Broncos had a coach that was the most successful in franchise history to that point -  John Ralston who had a record of 25-28-3 in his four years in Denver, under .500 but he had delivered the only two winning seasons Bronco fans had enjoyed in sixteen years.

However, Ralson who was a believer in thinking positively and was a certified Dale Carnegie instructor and would send his coaching staff to learning retreats and lecture players on Carnegie principles and it rubbed the players the wrong way. 

What also rubbed some players the wrong way was Ralston would make promises and not keep them and among those was a promise to bring in a "name quarterback". The former Stanford coach, who doubled as the Broncos general manager, was positive he could acquire Jim Plunkett when the Patriots put him on the market in the 1976 off-season. 

He couldn't.

Charley Johnson, the quarterback who'd led the Broncos to most of the Broncos victories during Ralson't tenure was gone. He'd retired to New Mexico.

That left the Broncos with strong-armed Steve Ramsey. Strong-armed and inaccurate and not trusted by the Broncos players. One of them was Lyle Alzado.

One day, early in the 1976 off-season,  Alzado wandered into the office of Mike Giddings, who was the director of pro scouting for the Broncos. It was a new position in the Broncos front office and it is likely that Giddings was the first to act in that capacity for any NFL team, one that focused only on evaluating NFL talent, not collegiate players.

"Pro scout . . .",  Alzado asked incredulously. "What the heck is a pro scout?" Giddings replied, "It's the league, which nobody's doing. Everybody's scouting college."

"Yeah, that's what I thought", Alzado replied, "Okay, pro scout, if you don’t mind, get us a damn quarterback because our guy is gonna kill us. He’s gonna go down, he’s gonna throw an interception, fumble in a crucial game, and he’s gonna kill us. Get us a quarterback."

Lyle Alzado

Giddings, as part of this duties, reviewed films of the 1975 Broncos seasons and gave reports to Ralston and the rest of the Broncos coaching staff with his now fairly well-known color grading system with blue being the top grade, red being next, then orange, then green, and so on. 

According to Giddings, when it came to Ramsey, "I said his grade was an orange or a green and Max Coley who was the offensive coordinator and backfield coach went berserk. How dare you? You don’t know Steve Ramsey. You haven’t been here." 

Giddings found out how committed Coley was to Ramsey. Later, Cooley cooled down and came to him and said, "Ramsey’s my guy, Mike. Sorry."

In the preseason Ramsey completed well under fifty percent of his passes and opened the season with a very poor performance in Cincinnati going 7 of 22 for 97 yards passing and two interceptions and no touchdowns. After seven preseason games and one regular season game, it was clear the quarterback position was a problem for the Broncos.

In week two the Jets traveled to Denver to play the Broncos and before the game, while sitting on one of the benches, two old friends met for a quick conversation—Giddings and Jets general manager Al Ward.

During the talk, Giddings said, "Joe’s gotta be going nuts." adding, "You got an untenable situation at quarterback. And we need a quarterback. This is a damn good Denver team and Ralson's going to get fired if we don’t get a quarterback." 

So, Ward and Giddings began to hammer out a trade for Namath. 

Ward said the Jets needed a receiver badly and the only one they'd take was Haven Moses. Denver had Rick Upchurch and Jack Dolbin so Giddings figured that Ralston would agree to that, at the time both were thought to have upsides. Ward added that the Broncos would probably have to throw in a third-round pick.

Giddings got back to Ward the same day, "After the game, I got him before they got on a plane. I said, “Okay. You got it, except you pay half Joe’s salary You pay 225 and throw in a fourth".

Ward tells him, "Done deal".   

"Can I take it to John (Ralston)? 

“Yup.” 

Giddings continues, "So, I take it to John. Namath’s coming to Denver, and the only people that know are John and me. However, one other person got involved, Max Coley."

No deal.

Coley told Ralston that he knew Ramsey was better than Namath.

What followed was a good year for the Broncos, their best ever to that point, but one with filled strife. 

In the game that essentially knocked the Broncos out of the playoffs, their fifth loss of the season was against the Patriots in late November.  The Patriots rolled over the Broncos 38-14 and Ramsey was awful. He was 11/28 for 124 yards and threw three picks and was sacked nine times. Ramsey just wouldn't get the ball off and when he did it was nowhere near the target. 

Giddings explained the situation further, "Alzado spent the year on injured reserve, they'd moved him to nose tackle and he got hurt (one of his scouting axioms is 'don't move blues') but he still traveled with the team, they let them do that in those days and Lyle was a leader on that team. Anyway, in the fourth quarter, Alzado comes by and he says, 'I told you. I told you we had to have a quarterback, goddamn you Giddings, why didn’t you get us a quarterback?'"

After the game, the Broncos are traveling to Providence to catch a plane since there was a storm and they couldn't fly out of Boston. Giddings recalls, "We know it’s over (playoff hopes), but we didn’t think that it would be over the way it ended up (in a blowout loss) and Lyle comes up and he taps me and says, 'Hey, Mike. I’m sorry. We know you had a deal for Namath. Thanks for trying'. And how he knew, I don’t know."

The Broncos won their final two games to end the season 9-5 but the players had a revolt against Ralston, the so-called Dirty Dozen who wrote a letter to the team ownership demanding changes they got them. The positive-thinking coach lost his job and became an instructor at the Dale Carnegie Institute in Denver in 1977 and resumed coaching as an offensive coordinator with the Eagles in 1978.

Namath had a terrible year in New York, worse than Ramsey's in Denver. And like Ralston, Holtz lost his job. 

The next year Namath finally ended up in Los Angeles where he wanted to be and didn't do well. The Broncos found another strong-armed quarterback with knees that were not great but not nearly as bad as Namath's named Craig Morton and Haven Moses was part of the beginning of a new era of winning football in Denver.

All's well that ends well. Namath would have been better in Denver than with the 1976 Jets and it could have saved Ralston's job. For a time. But hazarding a guess it could have been just enough to keep Denver in the throws of mediocrity for another year or two. 

Ralston's replacement. Red Miller was what was needed.