Examining the impact of the transformational QB class of 1983

How an unprecedented wave of first-round picks helped accelerate NFL teams' never-ending hunt for quarterback talent.

Phil Simms still remembers the goal that was posted on a board at the start of his rookie season for the New York Giants in 1979.

Completion percentage: 52 percent.

"I was thinking, Boy, I hope I can complete 50 percent," Simms said recently. "The game was centered around the running back and running. Everybody was in split backs, offset back, tight end, two wide receivers. Our third-down package? There was no such thing.

"In 1980 or '81, we were practicing shotgun in camp, and I was thinking, 'We're space-age.' "

"It changed pretty quick," Simms said.

It changed -- dramatically, permanently -- in large part because of the quarterbacks who were drafted in the first round four years after Simms. That group of quarterbacks -- six in all -- is so storied, so accomplished, that five months after Dan Marino retired in 2000, the Miami Dolphins feted him in a sold-out stadium packed with thousands of his jersey-wearing fans, dozens of his former teammates, his former coach (Don Shula), his favorite band (Hootie & the Blowfish) and a rather extraordinary clutch of contemporaries: the five QBs selected ahead of Marino in 1983. It was, somewhat remarkably, the first time John Elway (drafted No. 1 overall by the Colts, then traded to the Broncos), Todd Blackledge (No. 7 by the Chiefs), Jim Kelly (No. 14 by the Bills), Tony Eason (No. 15 by the Patriots), Ken O'Brien (No. 24 by the Jets) and Marino (No. 27 by the Dolphins) all gathered together. With their wives, they dined and danced the night away.

To each of the six, the Dolphins presented a painting of all of them in action, memorializing on canvas what the ensuing