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1. Dan Marino. I played APBA tabletop football in the early 1980s, and my friends and I had the 1984 set with the Dan Marino 48-touchdown card. The "66" roll was a "1" (automatic touchdown), which was pretty common for good quarterback's cards, but the "11" and "33" rolls were "2" (huge gain), the "22" and "44" rolls were "3" (substantial gain), and there were rolls for completions on weird die combinations that usually resulted in sacks for other quarterbacks. The card was so imbalanced that whichever of my friends owned it automatically won all of our tournaments. After playing with the card for two or three years, we turned it over to an 11-year-old neighbor, who could beat high school-aged tacticians like us just by calling "Medium Pass" and rolling the dice over and over.

Marino's stats broke the game's model that year. APBA charts weren't designed for a quarterback completing 65 percent of his passes and averaging nine yards per attempt. When you played against Marino, you used APBA's "D" pass defense as your default, and your opponent could safely use draw plays and screen passes as his "running game" everywhere beyond the red zone. That's essentially what was happening in real football, too: Teams played nickel non-stop against the Dolphins, and Don Shula started using scat backs like Lorenzo Hampton as featured runner-receivers. None of this sounds exotic now, but it was a sea change in the mid-1980s, when you still had teams handing the ball to the fullback 10 times per game. We felt the changing times on our back porches with dice and charts. In the NFL, they are still feeling it.

2. Bob Griese. He joins Bart Starr and Troy Aikman on the axis of winners with paltry stats. All three were great quarterbacks, not "winner sauce" guys, but all played on teams that were incredibly run-oriented for their eras. Griese is probably the weakest of the three, but all are legitimate Hall of Famers, and Griese's numbers would be far more interesting if he didn't spend his entire peak in the Dead Ball Era.

3. Jay Fiedler. Gosh golly, but we got here fast. Blame Griese and Marino, who dominated over two decades of Dolphins history. Fiedler was a very efficient journeyman who taught the Dolphins organization a terrible lesson -- that they could find capable quarterbacks hanging around the bottoms of other team's rosters. That sent them on a five-year odyssey of outsmarting the system, trading for every A.J. Feeley and Cleo Lemon they could find in the hope of getting another Fiedler on the cheap.

Ryan Fitzpatrick, I suppose, could be another Fiedler: Ivy Leaguer, scrambler, getting a shot late in his career. The difference is that Fielder walked onto a Jimmy Johnson-designed roster and got to be a caretaker. He would never have racked up a 37-23 career record for a rebuilding team.

4. Don Strock. Strock is probably the only quarterback on any Top Five list for a "real" team (not a recent expansion team) who was not his team's starter of record in any season. Strock backed up Griese, going 5-2 in seven starts in 1978. He then shared the job with David Woodley for a few years, often relieving the flaky Woodley just in time to lead a comeback. Strock helped engineer two fourth-quarter comebacks each in 1981 and 1982, all in games Woodley started. He threw four touchdowns in the 41-38 Dolphins-Chargers classic playoff game, then relieved Woodley briefly, to no avail, in the Super Bowl a year later. Strock then backed up Marino for five years, which was a do-nothing job.

The Strock-Woodley experiment seems idiotic in retrospect and made little sense at the time. The last thing you want to do to a talented youngster with concentration issues is yank him out of the lineup at the first sign of trouble. Shula kept doing it, and Woodley never developed. It was a strategy at least 15 years out of date. Strock had shown enough in relief of Griese that he should have just been the starter in 1981 and 1982. The Dolphins would have gone just as far.

5. Earl Morrall. Another backup. Morrall started nine regular season and two playoff games for the 1972 Dolphins, winning all of them (natch) and putting up big numbers in a few. Strock ranks above him as a Dolphins quarterback, but Morrall blows Strock away as the greatest backup of all time when you factor in his stint with the Colts.

Great news, Chad Henne! You have two career backups and Jay Fiedler above you on this list. It will only take a few workmanlike seasons for you to vault into position as the third-best quarterback of Dolphins history. Don't just hang around and wait for it to happen, though. Use Woodley as your cautionary tale. Go win some games with your arm, get your team to the playoffs, and cement your standing for a few years. Strock and Morrall won't mind you leaping over them: That's the way they lived their lives!

One reason I started doing these Top Fives was to demonstrate just how little historical depth most teams have at quarterback. Theoretically, we are dealing with 160 quarterbacks in this series, but there are many duplicates, and teams like the Ravens and Texans are going to have some silly names on their lists. But here's a team with a 50-year history, and once we get past No. 3, our choices are a couple of veterans who made names for themselves elsewhere or obscure guys like Dennis Shaw, who somehow threw 68 career interceptions despite a job description which read "give ball to O.J."

When this series wraps up, we will probably have covered 100 quarterbacks of historic note. I guarantee that if I called Donovan McNabb one of the 100 greatest quarterbacks in pro football history in a Philly bar, some people would laugh at me or try to fight me. This list is proof that McNabb is a no-brainer for a list like that; that we really have to argue about guys like Wade Wilson or the early career Matt Ryan when picking a Top 100.

Here ya go Hoodie.

How did *I* get dragged into this?  I didn't post anything. 

I think Pennington was better than Fiedler.

How did *I* get dragged into this?  I didn't post anything. 

Woodly took us to a Super Bowl, he should be ahead of Fiedler.

Even worse, our drought is causing us to crucify any QB at the first sign of adversity because we are desperate for another great one.