Craig Morton, First Quarterback to Start Super Bowl for Two Teams, Dies at 83

Craig Morton, the first quarterback to start a Super Bowl for two franchises, died Saturday in Mill Valley, California, at 83. Over 18 NFL seasons, Morton moved from Dallas to New York to Denver and became one of only four quarterbacks to start the league’s biggest game for two organizations, joining Peyton Manning, Tom Brady and Kurt Warner. His only Super Bowl ring came as a backup, a sharp reminder that in Morton’s era, quarterbacks could be both central to a franchise’s identity and shuffled aside as teams chased a better answer.

Morton entered the league as the No. 5 overall pick in the 1965 draft, taken by the Cowboys out of California after Dallas also faced competition from the AFL’s Oakland Raiders. In Dallas, he backed up Don Meredith before becoming the starter in 1969, then guided the Cowboys to their first Super Bowl appearance in Super Bowl V. Morton threw Dallas’ first touchdown pass in a title game, but the Cowboys lost 16-13 to Baltimore. By the next season, he was sharing the spotlight with Roger Staubach, and the quarterback competition became so intense that Tom Landry had the two alternate plays in one game.

The Cowboys eventually moved Morton to the Giants in 1974, a trade that helped Dallas land a first-round pick it used on defensive tackle Randy White, one of the era’s defining players. Morton struggled in New York, then found a late-career revival in Denver after a 1977 trade. There, he became the final piece for Red Miller’s Broncos and the Orange Crush defense, leading Denver to its first playoff appearance and its first Super Bowl berth. That run ended in Super Bowl XII, a 27-10 loss to the Cowboys, with Morton thrown back into the kind of spotlight that had defined his whole career.

Morton finished with 207 games played, 144 starts, 27,908 passing yards, 183 touchdown passes and 187 interceptions, numbers that place him among the most enduring quarterbacks of his generation. He completed 2,053 of 3,786 passes for a 54.2 percent completion rate and a record of 81-62-1. At California, he built a strong-arm reputation under coaches tied to Marv Levy and Bill Walsh, and he later earned a place in the Broncos Ring of Fame and the Colorado Sports Hall of Fame. His career traced the NFL’s transformation from a league of unsettled quarterback hierarchies into one increasingly defined by the position’s star power and the franchises built around it.