ANYONE CAN PLAY QB.

Byline: Billy Witz

Where have you gone Joe DiMaggio? Or, for that matter, Troy Aikman, Steve Young, Jim Kelly, Phil Simms, Dan Marino and John Elway?

When it comes to wistful longings for yesteryear and why there's no longer any great teams in pro football, there's no better place to begin the discussion than at quarterback.

Not so long ago, it used to be that championships weren't won on the football field, but on the draft board. If you won in the NFL, it was with a bona fide, blue-chip quarterback.

From 1983 through the 2000 season, 24 of the 36 starting quarterbacks in the Super Bowl were former first-round picks. Another seven were chosen in the second and third rounds, and their names included Montana and Favre.

You didn't need to be a great quarterback to get to the Super Bowl, it seemed. Just one with the right tools - good enough, at least, to at one point have been a high draft pick, be it Doug Williams, Jim McMahon, a developing Steve McNair or an aging Chris Chandler.

This point was emphatically driven home a few years ago in back-to-back Super Bowls. In the 2000 game, Kurt Warner became the first undrafted quarterback to win the Super Bowl. The next year, the opposing quarterbacks were Trent Dilfer and Kerry Collins, both former first-round picks who had spent their careers making people wonder why.

What they might have done, unwittingly, is deliver a message to legions of quarterbacks everywhere: why not me?

And so it's been ever since.

The quarterbacks in the past two Super Bowls have been Warner, Tom Brady (sixth-round pick), Rich Gannon (fourth round) and Brad Johnson (ninth round).

The position that once was dominated by blue bloods now is also the dominion of the hoi polloi.

The Kansas City Chiefs have the NFL's best record with Trent Green, a former eighth-round pick of the San Diego Chargers, and four other undrafted quarterbacks have their teams in first place: Baltimore's Anthony Wright, St. Louis' Marc Bulger, Carolina's Jake Delhomme and Cincinnati's Jon Kitna. Another undrafted, Jay Fiedler, has Miami in position for a playoff berth as does Seattle's Matt Hasselbeck, a former sixth-round pick.

``It emphasizes, you better be thorough, give people a chance and don't draw conclusions too closely,'' said Bill Walsh, the former San Francisco 49ers coach and quarterback guru who is now a consultant for the club.

``I think it's an indicator that if a quarterback has certain qualities, good instincts and he's durable, then the most important thing is experience and exposure to the game. It takes time to go through the tough part of learning and sometimes failing over and over to the point where they begin to understand and season themselves into thinking clearly.''

There's no better example of that than Kitna. Undrafted out of Central Washington in 1995, he flourished in the World League and eventually won the Seattle Seahawks starting job. But he floundered, was benched and last year signed on as a backup with the Bengals. He was expected to start this season while Cincinnati rebuilt under first-year coach Marvin Lewis, keeping the job warm for No. 1 pick Carson Palmer.

Now, Kitna is playing himself into MVP talk.

Free agency, which has impacted just about everything else in the NFL over the past 10 years, has come into play here, too. Until then, it was much more difficult for backup quarterbacks to move between clubs, where a better opportunity or system might exist.

The Miami Dolphins, for years, clung to Don Strock - the league's best backup who would have started for most teams. More recently, the Raiders did the same with Steve Beuerlein.

Now, if a backup shows any promise, teams can't afford to keep them. Green Bay dealt Hasselbeck to Seattle and Aaron Brooks to New Orleans before they lost them, and Rob Johnson, Brad Johnson and Green are among those who have landed big free-agent contracts after impressive cameos.

Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb was the second pick of the 1999 draft, right between two flops - Tim Couch and Akili Smith. That so many unheralded quarterbacks are having success in the NFL points to the difficulty of evaluating in a test-obsessive process.

``I think sometimes what they're missing is it's not in a written test, it's not in a verbal meeting,'' McNabb said. ``It's just playmaking ability. Sometimes you look at some of the quarterbacks coming out, you evaluate them pretty much on their stats, how they play the game. But you never really can evaluate the size of his heart, his determination, his competitive nature.''

Although McNabb, McNair and the Indianapolis Colts' Peyton Manning have their teams positioned as Super Bowl contenders, you'll find many other high draft picks among the league's bottom feeders. Eight of the 11 teams sitting in last place are quarterbacked by a first-round pick.

With so many high-profile flops in recent years - Ryan Leaf, Cade McNown, Smith and Couch - and the emergence of the overlooked, might teams begin to rethink spending a top pick on a quarterback?

Not likely, Walsh says.

``I blame that on personnel departments of the given clubs for not doing their due diligence,'' said Walsh, who pointed the finger at his own club for making Jim Druckenmiller the first quarterback chosen in 1997 when he was not with the club.

``That was a very foolish decision. Ryan Leaf was another. Druckenmiller never demonstrated any mobility. Leaf, anytime anybody hit him, he'd go to the ground. That's not the way Terry Bradshaw played.

``You have to be in the right situation to break out of mediocrity. You have to have good, solid coaching, but on the other hand experience means so much. I think you'll see people look a lot closer and they may give more time to a quarterback to develop.''

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ON THE GRIDIRON

By Matthew Kredell