In doing a series that asks the impossible task of naming only four members of the Rams in history worthy of a Mount Rushmore, there’s always going to be a trickster in the comments section who is the first person to invent the idea of naming players who actually were not very good. This has led to people asking for a Mount Rushmore of bad players, and to narrow that list down, a Mount Rushmore of bad players who were drafted in the first round.
Of course, the names flowing into your brain right now were probably all drafted after 2008, I’m guessing?
You could definitely make a list just from the post-Mike Martz era between Steve Spagnuolo, Scott Linehan, and Jeff Fisher. I will name their names soon. But what about players you probably do not even know exist? Like Corby Davis.
The first overall pick of the 1938 draft, Davis’s official position is listed as “BB” (which is the reality show Big Brother, where I come from) and he only played in 39 games over four seasons with the Rams. A graduate of Indiana, Davis had an unremarkable career with the Rams and then left football in 1942 to enlist in the Army and fight in World War II.
Terry Baker, 1963, first overall
The next time the Rams drafted a player first overall who could be considered a bust by today’s standards was in 1963, when the team drafted one of the most remarkable college athletes of all-time, quarterback Terry Baker. Here he is (left) talking to teammate Zeke Bratkowski:
As a senior quarterback in Oregon State’s T offense in 1962, Baker took college football by storm that year by leading the country in passing yards, touchdowns, and at the time was the second-most productive player in the sport’s history by total yards in a season with 2,276. Baker won the Heisman for 9-2 Oregon State, which in itself would not make him a college athletics legend.
What makes him a legend is that Terry Baker also led Oregon State to the final four in the men’s basketball tournament that school year, and he was also one of the school’s best pitchers on the baseball team; Baker threw a football left-handed and a baseball right-handed. To top it all off, in case you weren’t already sure that you want your daughter to marry this guy, he was an Academic All-American who would end up getting his law degree and becoming a lawyer.
In 1963, the Los Angeles Rams had the number one pick in the draft after going 1-12-1 the previous season. But the Rams had sort of a problem: They had the number one pick in the draft with an enticing quarterback selection sitting there, but L.A. had also drafted Roman Gabriel with the number two pick in 1962.
In today’s world, the Rams would either trade Gabriel or trade the number one pick. Back then, they picked Baker and hoped for the best. Despite some pushback that Baker was a bad pick from the start, this article about his career in 1987 quotes an executive who refutes that notion, stating that any team would have picked him first:
“A lot of people look back today and question the Rams’ selection of Baker as the first pick,” says one NFL personnel director. “But every single scouting department in the league had him rated as the top pick in the draft that year. He would have gone first no matter who had the first choice. “The guy could do it all. He averaged five yards a carry, he was a high-percentage passer when not many were, he had quick feet, a fast release, perhaps the best mind in all of college football, and he was a hell of a leader. And any doubts anyone had about him were blown away on that one play in the bowl game.”
The “one play” was a 99-yard touchdown run against Villanova in the Liberty Bowl.
Baker: “On first down, we ran a play that we shouldn’t have: a roll-out in which I had to lose about five yards before getting into the play. A couple of their guys grabbed me in the end zone, and I barely slipped away from them. When I got to the line of scrimmage no one was near me, and I ran 99 yards alone. We won the game 6-0.”
“Terry not only won the Liberty Bowl for us,” says Prothro, who went on to coach UCLA, the Los Angeles Rams, and the San Diego Chargers, “but he flew down to Kentucky the next day for a basketball tournament that Oregon State was in and made the all-tournament team.”
Baker says that when he got to L.A., “the Rams were so unorganized” at the time that the coaches had no ideas what was going on. It’s hard to side against Baker given the context clues of a team picking quarterbacks in back-to-back drafts. Head coach Harland Svare started Baker in the first game of the season, something that Baker says he was “no more prepared to do than the man on the moon.”
After throwing three interceptions, the rookie was benched right there and was in Svare’s dog house for the rest of the season.
Baker appeared in five games in 1964 and nine games in 1965, but only as a running back. Said to have too weak of an arm to play quarterback in the NFL, he would only throw two passes for the rest of his career and ended up going to the CFL in 1966. His career there wouldn’t last long either and he ended up taking the bar exam and leaving football for good.
