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Story #191 — November 4, 2026 — Rare — Sports / Current Events

Anyone Old Enough to Remember Clint Longley? A Thanksgiving 1974 Story for Everyone Betting on the Ravens-Jaguars Game

My friends are betting Jacksonville because the Ravens start their No. 3 quarterback. Anyone old enough to remember Clint Longley, Thanksgiving 1974?

By TodayDaysOld

My friends are all betting on Jacksonville this Thursday night, and honestly, I don’t blame them. The Jaguars are 5-2, three games up in the AFC South, and they just beat the Colts 42-7. The Ravens are 4-4, have lost three straight, and got run out of Buffalo 36-10 on Sunday. Then the quarterback room fell apart. Lamar Jackson jammed his right thumb in Buffalo, needs surgery, and is headed to injured reserve. Tyler Huntley got hurt in the same game (turf toe). Skylar Thompson was already on IR.

Black-and-white photo of a young Clint Longley in a Cowboys No. 19 jersey, smiling in the locker room and holding a Dallas Morning News front page headlined "Longley-est Shot of All Pays Off".
Clint Longley in the Cowboys locker room with the newspaper headline after the Redskins game. Photo supplied.

So the Ravens’ starter Thursday night at M&T Bank Stadium, 8:15 Eastern on Prime Video, is Joe Fagnano: a 25-year-old undrafted rookie out of UConn who was the No. 3 quarterback until Sunday. Coach Jesse Minter named him the starter. It will be his first NFL start. His line in relief last week was 10-of-21 for 91 yards with an interception and a lost fumble, and he has a bad right ankle of his own; he wore a brace at practice. The Ravens have reportedly agreed to trade for Jacoby Brissett from Arizona, according to ESPN, but the deal isn’t official and is expected to be completed this weekend. ESPN has Baltimore as a 10-point home underdog, its biggest in 11 years. Earlier in the week it was 8.5, so call it 9 or 10.

My friends looked at all that and reached for their wallets. And I said the thing a 62-year-old says in that situation: anyone old enough to remember Clint Longley?

So here we go.

Thanksgiving, 1974

Texas Stadium, November 28, 1974. Cowboys hosting the Redskins, 63,243 in the seats, the whole country on the couch. Before the game, Redskins lineman Diron Talbert said, per the Cowboys’ own site, “All they have left is that rookie.” The idea was simple: knock out Roger Staubach and the game is over.

Then they knocked out Roger Staubach. He left with a concussion after going 3-of-11 for 32 yards with an interception, and Dallas trailed 16-3 in the third quarter. In came the rookie: Clint Longley, out of Abilene Christian, acquired that July for a fifth-round pick.

What happened next is the reason I still bring his name up at parties, which may be why I don’t get invited to many:

  • Longley went 11-of-20 for 203 yards and two touchdowns in relief.
  • The first was a 35-yarder to Billy Joe DuPree.
  • The second came with under half a minute left (sources say 28 or 35 seconds, and I’m not going to pretend I know which): a 50-yard touchdown pass to Drew Pearson.
  • Efren Herrera’s extra point made it Cowboys 24, Redskins 23.

In the huddle, Pearson told him he’d fake inside and go deep. Longley’s reply, per the Cowboys’ site: “Sounds good... go deep.”

George Allen, the Redskins’ coach, called it probably the toughest loss of his career, according to Fox Sports. Cowboys guard Blaine Nye came up with the line everybody quotes. It was, he said, “the triumph of the uncluttered mind.”

I have been trying to achieve an uncluttered mind for 62 years. Turns out you just have to be 22 and not know any better.

The Mad Bomber

The nickname came before the heroics, and it was not a compliment. In rookie camp Longley threw passes so wild that one reportedly hit Tom Landry’s observation tower. Somebody started calling him “The Mad Bomber,” and nobody seems to know exactly who, which is how the best nicknames work.

He was not even supposed to be a Cowboy. Nobody took him in the regular 1974 draft. The Bengals grabbed him in the first round of the 1974 supplemental draft, then on July 3, 1974 shipped him to Dallas for a fifth-round pick (No. 122 overall, which Cincinnati used on Jeff West). Four and a half months later he was the most famous backup in football.

Quick facts: Clint Longley

  • Born Howard Clinton Longley Jr., July 28, 1952, Wichita Falls, Texas
  • Abilene Christian: 3,167 yards and 28 touchdowns as a junior in 1973, when the team won the NAIA title (per Wikipedia)
  • Undrafted in the regular 1974 draft; first-round pick of the Bengals in the 1974 supplemental draft
  • Traded to Dallas July 3, 1974 for a fifth-round pick
  • Thanksgiving 1974: 11-of-20, 203 yards, 2 TDs in relief; Cowboys 24, Redskins 23
  • 1975: 4 games, 1 start, on the roster for Super Bowl X (1-for-1 for 26 yards in the postseason, per StatsCrew)
  • NFL career line: 9 games, 441 yards, 5 TDs, 4 INTs

The punch

Here is where the story turns, and it turns hard.

In August 1976, at training camp at Cal Lutheran in Thousand Oaks, California, a few days after a first fight with Staubach, Longley sucker-punched him from behind while Staubach was pulling on his shoulder pads. Staubach went into a scale, needed stitches, and still has a scar above his left eyebrow. Randy White told the whole story to the Dallas Morning News in 2004. Staubach’s words for it, per Pro Football Talk: “premeditated” and “gutless.”

That was it for Longley in Dallas. On August 30, 1976, the Cowboys traded him to San Diego along with their 1977 first-round pick (No. 24) for the Chargers’ first-rounder (No. 14) and second-rounder (No. 41). Those picks helped Dallas move up to No. 2 overall in the 1977 draft, where they took Tony Dorsett.

Read that again. The lasting legacy of the sucker punch is Tony Dorsett. The Cowboys got hit in the face and came out of it with a Hall of Fame running back. Only the Cowboys.

Longley played briefly in the CFL and faded out of football quickly. Staubach has said he has forgiven him, per that same 2004 Dallas Morning News piece.

How often does the backup actually save the day?

I went looking for a stat on how often a team wins with its third quarterback. I could not find one, and I suspect that is because the honest answer is “not often enough for anyone to bother counting.” What you get instead are the legends, which is a very different thing:

  • Tom Brady, 2001: Mo Lewis hits Drew Bledsoe on September 23, 2001. A sixth-round pick takes over, keeps the job, and the Patriots beat the Rams 20-17 in Super Bowl XXXVI.
  • Kurt Warner, 1999: Trent Green tears a knee ligament in the preseason. Warner is Super Bowl XXXIV MVP in a 23-16 win over the Titans, throwing for a then-record 414 yards.
  • Nick Foles, 2017: Carson Wentz tears his ACL on December 10, 2017. Foles is Super Bowl LII MVP, 373 yards, three touchdowns, plus a catch on the Philly Special in a 41-33 win over New England. (He was the No. 2, not the No. 3, so partial credit.)
  • Case Keenum, 2017: the Minneapolis Miracle. Vikings 29, Saints 24, on a 61-yard Keenum-to-Diggs pass as time expired, January 14, 2018.
  • Brock Purdy, 2022: the last pick of the draft, Mr. Irrelevant, the 49ers’ No. 3. Jimmy Garoppolo breaks his foot on December 4, 2022. Purdy goes 25-of-37 for 210 yards and two touchdowns and San Francisco beats Miami 33-17.

And the one nobody puts on a poster: Matt Cassel, 2008. He filled in for Brady all year, the Patriots went 11-5, and they missed the playoffs. Which is actually a pretty good season, and it still counts as a cautionary tale, because the backup’s job is not to be fine. It is to be a miracle.

That is the trick with these lists. We remember the Longleys and the Purdys because they are the exceptions. Nobody remembers the hundreds of backups who went 10-of-21 for 91 yards and were never heard from again. The exceptions are the whole reason we tell the story.

Back to Thursday night

I want to be clear that the Ravens and the Jaguars have nothing to do with Clint Longley. There is no connection, no curse, no anniversary. The only link is a rookie nobody planned on, walking into a prime-time spotlight with the other team’s defensive line saying, in so many words, “All they have left is that rookie.”

Which is exactly what my friends are saying. And they may well be right. A 10-point line is a 10-point line, and Joe Fagnano’s ankle brace is not nothing.

But I’m 62. I remember a 22-year-old called the Mad Bomber walking into a 16-3 hole on Thanksgiving with a Hall of Famer on the bench holding his head. I remember “Sounds good... go deep.” I’m not predicting anything. I’m just saying a point spread is a number, not a promise.

Anyone old enough to remember Joe Fagnano? Ask me Friday.

Sources

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