Washington Football Team: A history of quarterback trades

The three best QB trades

In 1964, two NFL cellar-dwellers swapped young QBs (along with a couple of defensive backs). Though the Washington Football Team gave up a pretty good QB in Norm Snead, they got Sonny Jurgensen in return from Philadelphia, to the joy of fans from the mid-60s right through to today. Sonny did not produce championships, but he made the team both respectable and exciting, and treated DC fans to one of the best pure throwers the league has ever seen.

Seven years later, when George Allen came to town, one of his first moves was to swap a couple of draft picks (Allen never cared much for draft picks) and a run-of-the-mill linebacker named Tom Roussel for veteran New Orleans quarterback Billy Kilmer. New Orleans was a pretty bad franchise back then and they were excited to be moving on with a high draft pick, which everyone knew would either result in Jim Plunkett or Archie Manning. So Billy came to the Washington Football Team, and he and Sonny teamed up to take Washington to its first Super Bowl a year later.

Billy and Sonny would team up in one other major pursuit. The two veterans were determined to make sure a newly acquired youngster would never see the field after the Washington Football Team traded for him in 1974. They were successful for a time, but eventually, that youngster, Joe Theismann, would not only see the field, but would lead Washington to its first championship since the days of Sammy Baugh.

Theismann was acquired in a trade with the Miami Dolphins, for whom Joe had never played. He had gone to Canada when he could not work out a deal with Miami. Washington picked him up for a first-round draft pick, which turned out to be Larry Gordon. Gordon was a quality linebacker for seven seasons in Miami, before he tragically succumbed to heart disease at the age of 28.