Roger Staubach was the best quarterback available in the 1964 NFL Draft, and every team in the league knew exactly why he fell to the tenth round. He wasn’t injured. He wasn’t a bust. He was on his way to Vietnam.
For four straight years while he served his country on the other side of the world, the Dallas Cowboys kept sending him something unusual through the mail. Footballs. Just to keep his arm ready for work. Most people assumed he would never play.
You know Roger Staubach by the nickname “Captain America,” the quarterback who led the Dallas Cowboys to two Super Bowl titles and became one of the most beloved figures in franchise history. What almost no one remembers is how close this story came to never happening at all, and how much it depended on a stubborn, patient head coach who was willing to wait years for a player he hadn’t even intended to pick. This is the story of a promise kept on both sides. A young man who served his country before playing a single professional game, and a coach who refused to give up on him.
To understand just how strange this entire story is, you first have to understand the world of the 1964 NFL Draft and how unusual Roger Staubach’s path to it actually was. Staubach had just finished one of the greatest college football seasons anyone had ever seen. He won the Heisman Trophy in 1963 and led Navy to a national No. 2 ranking.
He was the best player in the country by almost every measure. Under normal circumstances, a quarterback with that résumé would have been selected in the first round, possibly as the very first pick overall. But every team in the league knew something else about Roger Staubach. He still owed the U.
S. Navy a four-year service commitment after graduation, which likely included deployment in a war that was rapidly escalating on the other side of the world. Teams don’t like spending high picks on players who might not suit up for half a decade. Round after round passed.
Staubach kept falling. When Dallas finally came up to pick in the tenth round, the story behind their selection was almost comically unglamorous. Cowboys player personnel director Gil Brandt, the man actually responsible for scouting college talent, was completely off duty in the middle of trade discussions with another team and, as has been told for decades since, was getting something to eat. That left general manager Tex Schramm alone to handle the pick.
Schramm was a brilliant businessman, a marketing mind, and one of the most important executives in NFL history. But by his own team’s later admission, he was not a football scout, and he hadn’t been closely following college game film that season. When his turn came, he simply wrote down the only name he knew from the newspapers. The Heisman winner from Navy.
Roger Staubach became a Dallas Cowboy almost by accident. A name remembered by a tired executive rather than a calculated bet from anyone in the draft room. Here’s what makes this story exceptional. Almost no one in Dallas’s front office in 1964 had any real plan for Roger Staubach.
He was what the league calls a “future pick,” a low-cost gamble on a player who might never arrive. Then something happened that set the Dallas Cowboys apart from every other team that had passed on him. They didn’t just wait. They stayed in touch.
After graduating from the Naval Academy in June 1965, Staubach volunteered for a difficult assignment that most young officers in his position would have quietly avoided if they could. He didn’t have to serve in Vietnam. But he chose to. He spent a full year at Chu Lai base as a supply officer responsible for 41 soldiers doing essential, unglamorous work far from any football field at a time when the war was escalating and the nightly news back home was getting harder to watch.
He returned to the United States in September 1967 and spent the remainder of his four-year commitment stateside, playing football wherever the Navy allowed, service teams, base leagues, whatever would keep his body and his arm close to playing shape. Through all of it, the Dallas Cowboys stayed in touch. Every few months, a package would arrive wherever Staubach was stationed. Footballs sent by an organization that had picked him almost by chance three years earlier and was under absolutely no obligation to remember his name, let alone invest in keeping his arm ready for work that was still years away.
It’s a small detail, almost a footnote in most accounts of his career. But think about what it actually represents. A professional football team spending its money and attention on a player it wouldn’t see in uniform for five years simply because someone in that organization decided he was worth the wait. Staubach finally joined Dallas Cowboys training camp in 1969.
He was 27 years old, an age at which most successful NFL quarterbacks had already played several seasons of their prime careers. Instead, Roger Staubach was a rookie competing from scratch for a backup role behind a veteran starter named Craig Morton. If you’re imagining a triumphant overnight arrival, that’s not what actually happened. Staubach played sparingly that first season, watching from the sideline as Morton led the Cowboys to their first division title in franchise history, then to Super Bowl V, a painful three-point loss to the Baltimore Colts decided in the final seconds by a field goal.
This is where Tom Landry’s patience is tested a second time in this story. Because it would have been the easiest thing in the world after that Super Bowl appearance to simply stick with the quarterback who had gotten them there. Instead, heading into the 1971 season, Landry made an unusual decision that frustrated many people inside and outside that locker room. He opened a genuine competition for the starting job between Morton and Staubach, alternating them, in some cases swapping quarterbacks between plays, refusing to simply hand the job to either one out of loyalty or convenience.
It wasn’t a popular decision at the time. To many outside observers, it looked like a coach who couldn’t make up his mind. By game eight of that season, after a loss to the St. Louis Cardinals, Landry made his call.
Roger Staubach, the man Dallas had waited seven years for since that accidental tenth-round pick, was named the starting quarterback of the Dallas Cowboys. What happened next is the kind of thing that doesn’t happen by accident. Staubach lost no games he started for the remainder of that season. Ten straight victories, leading Dallas all the way to Super Bowl VI, where they decisively beat the Miami Dolphins 24-3.
Staubach was named the game’s MVP. He had also just been named the league’s MVP that same season, seven years, almost to the month, after a tired general manager wrote his name down because it was the only one he recognized. Roger Staubach was a Super Bowl champion. Here’s what no one expected back in 1964 when Staubach was falling round after round in that draft simply because of his military commitment.
That commitment, the very thing that should have scared off every front office, turned out to be part of what made him the player he eventually became. His former teammate, defensive lineman Thomas Henderson, put it simply years later. Before anyone starts arguing about the greatest quarterback to ever play the position, they’d better be able to name another man who served in Vietnam first. Staubach carried something onto that field that no amount of college tape or conditioning tests could measure.
A maturity and resilience honed not in a football program, but in a supply depot on the other side of the world. At 27, he started his career at the bottom of someone else’s roster. Over the eleven seasons that followed, Roger Staubach became exactly what Tom Landry had patiently waited for, a leader who could seize control in the decisive moments of the season. A two-time Super Bowl champion, six-time Pro Bowler, and Hall of Famer since 1985.
Dallas made the playoffs in 10 of his 11 seasons. He became the face of an entire era of Cowboys football, the original “Captain Comeback,” the quarterback who helped transform a team still searching for its identity into the franchise the entire country would eventually call “America’s Team. ”
None of that was inevitable. It depended on a general manager who happened to recognize one name on a list.
It depended on a young man who chose the most difficult version of his military service rather than the easiest. It depended on an organization willing to keep sending footballs to a soldier on the other side of the world for years, for no other reason than their belief that he was worth the investment. And it depended on a head coach who was twice willing to make the decision that required patience rather than the easier one. First by simply waiting five years for the player to show up, then by refusing to hand him the job when he arrived, insisting he earn it the same hard way everything had to be earned in Tom Landry’s world.
Perhaps that’s the real thread holding this story together. We remember Roger Staubach for his comebacks, the championships, and the nickname that made him seem like a superhero. What’s easy to forget is how much of that career was built entirely on the patience of others.
A coach and an organization that looked at a 27-year-old rookie with no professional experience and saw exactly what those four years of waiting had already built in him.