Last summer, I wrote a post on the percentage of each player’s receiver yards that came from each quarterback. Aaron Schatz asked the following trivia question yesterday that made me think of that old post.
Wes Welker will become the fourth player to catch passes from both Tom Brady and Peyton Manning. Can you name the first three?
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That got me to thinking about other players who have played with Hall of Fame quarterbacks. There are 23 modern era quarterbacks in the Hall of Fame. Brett Favre, Kurt Warner, Manning, Brady, and Drew Brees are Hall of Famers in spirit, and Aaron Rodgers isn’t far behind those guys. That’s 29: I threw in Ken Anderson to get us to an even 30.
I then checked to see how many players caught touchdown passes from more than one of those players. The most common pairings were from quarterbacks on the same team: Joe Montana and Steve Young (9), Norm Van Brocklin and Bob Waterfield (8), Sonny Jurgensen and Van Brocklin (6), and Favre and Rodgers (6).
But there were some pretty interesting ones on the list, too. Assuming Warner makes the Hall of Fame, Amp Lee will be the only player in NFL history to catch touchdowns from four Hall of Fame quarterbacks (Warner, Montana, Young, and Warren Moon). Currently, Lee is one of five players to catch passes from three quarterbacks in the Hall of Fame:
- Preston Pearson played with the Colts, Steelers, and Cowboys, so he caught touchdowns from Johnny Unitas, Terry Bradshaw, and Roger Staubach.
- Dick Bielski caught touchdowns from Van Brocklin and Jurgensen with the Eagles and then Unitas when he played for Baltimore.
- Preston Carpenter played for five teams from 1956 to 1967, and caught touchdowns from Otto Graham, Jurgensen, and Fran Tarkenton. His last year was with Miami, where he teamed with a rookie Bob Griese, but Carpenter did not reach the end zone.
- Mike Sherrard caught touchdowns from Young and Montana, then spent three years with the Giants, before catching his last touchdown from John Elway in 1996.
The table below lists every player to catch a touchdown pass from at least two of the 30 quarterbacks. Here’s how to read the list. Jerry Rice caught touchdowns from both Steve Young and Joe Montana, and he caught 92 touchdowns from Young and 67 from Montana.
The table is long, so the search function is your friend. If you type “Drew Brees Tom Brady” then the five men who caught touchdowns from both players will appear. Typing “Marino Favre” will also bring up some interesting names. Alas,
I also created a 30×30 matrix of all quarterback combos, which you can view here. The numbers represent how many players caught touchdown passes from both quarterbacks.