Shadows of Knight – "Someone Like Me" (1967)

I’m not changing my suggestion 

You need someone just like me

During his very successful 13-year stint as the head football coach at the University of Michigan, Lloyd Carr’s teams won five Big Ten titles and the 1997 national championship.  As a result, he was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame after he retired.

But Lloyd Carr let Tom Brady sit on the bench for his first two seasons at Michigan.  And even when Brady was a senior, Carr failed to discern Brady’s greatness, choosing to platoon him at quarterback with sophomore Drew Henson for the first seven games of the season.

Tom Brady, riding the pines at Michigan

Carr wasn’t the only distinguished coach to underestimate Brady’s ability.  Bill Belichick kept Brady on the New England bench his rookie year, and he might have remained there for years if Patriots QB Drew Bledsoe hadn’t suffered a serious injury early the next season.

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Like Brady, the late Frank Ryan struggled to persuade both his college and NFL coaches that he deserved to be a starting quarterback.  

Ryan and King Hill split playing time fairly evenly in 1956, when both were juniors at Rice University.  But Hill was the dominant member of Rice’s QB tandem in 1957 – Ryan took only about a third of the snaps for the Owls that year.

Given how good King Hill was, you might wonder how Ryan got even that much playing time.  Hill was not only the consensus first-team All-American quarterback that year, but also the #1 overall pick in the 1958 NFL draft.

Ryan was surprised to be drafted in the fifth round by the Los Angeles Rams – he had assumed his football days were over, and was planning to pursue a graduate degree in mathematics at his alma mater.  He started only a few games in his first four years in the league.  

Frank Ryan rarely started for the Rams

The Cleveland Browns thought Ryan would be a good backup, and traded for him before the 1962 season.  But their first-string QB was injured halfway through the season, giving Ryan the opportunity to be a starter that he had been waiting for.  

No other NFL signal caller – not Johnny Unitas, not Bart Starr, not Fran Tarkenton, not Sonny Jurgensen – threw for more touchdowns than Ryan did during the years that he was the Browns’ starting QB.  He led the team to five consecutive winning seasons and the 1964 NFL championship, and played in three Pro Bowls.

(Scroll down to read more about Frank Ryan, who was an accomplished mathematician as well as a star quarterback.)

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You may be wondering whatever happened to King Hill, the All-American who beat out Ryan for the starting spot at Rice when both were seniors.

Hill had only modest success as a professional quarterback – due in part to the fact that he spent virtually all of his career on the rosters of some very bad teams – but don’t let that make you think he wasn’t a remarkable athlete.

While he was at Rice, Hill not only was an All-American QB but also an outstanding punter and a defensive back.  In 1957, he almost single-handedly led the Owls to a 7-6 upset win over #1 ranked Texas A&M.  

King Hill

Hill not only scored Rice’s only TD, he kicked the extra point, intercepted a pair of passes, and kept the heavily favored Aggies pinned deep in their own end of the field with well-placed punts.  (Hill was his team’s primary punter during most of his NFL seasons.)

“I have been saying all season that King Hill was a great athlete,” A&M’s legendary head coach Paul “Bear” Bryant said after the game. “He made me look good on Saturday, but I wish he hadn’t.  He did everything but take up tickets.”

Hill wasn’t just a gridiron star in college.  He also played basketball and golf while at Rice, making him one of the last three-sport lettermen in major college athletics.

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Like Frank Ryan, King Hill was more than just an athlete.  Highly respected by his peers, he was a key figure in the formation of the NFL Players Association, helping to negotiate the first collective bargaining agreement between NFL players and owners.  

After retiring as a player, Hill spent the next nine years as an Houston Oilers assistant coach before moving to New Orleans, where he was the Saints’ offensive coordinator for five seasons.  The Philadelphia Eagles then hired him as their scouting director, a position he held for seven years.

Hill loved golf, and helped promote a number of charity golf tournaments after retiring from coaching.  Among the causes he supported were the Ronald McDonald Houses and the Special Olympics.

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The Rolling Stones, Animals, and Yardbirds were English bands who started out playing Chicago-style blues songs.

The Shadows of Knight – who are best known for their 1965 cover of Them’s “Gloria” – were a Chicago band that sounded like they were a British group playing Chicago-style blues.

“Someone Like Me” is a non-album single they released in 1967 that failed to chart.  The record works despite being a hot mess – if I didn’t know better, I’d swear that the lyrics and the music were written by two different people who never met each other.

Click here to listen to “Someone Like Me.”

Click here to buy the record from Amazon.