Put him in the hall.
Anthony Munoz had Ken Anderson’s back for much of their time together on the Cincinnati Bengals and still does today.
“It should have been long ago that No. 14 was with me,” Munoz said, referring to his quarterback’s candidacy for the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio.
It’s time.
“Ken was an MVP, took us to the Super Bowl and was one of the most accurate passers ever,” Munoz said. “He was one of the best.”
Arguably the NFL’s greatest offensive tackle of all-time, the athletic 6-foot-6, 278-pound Munoz played from 1980 to 1992 and is the lone Hall of Fame inductee from the Cincinnati Bengals, a 1968 expansion team.
He will be joined in 10 days by the late Ken Riley, a cornerback who played 15 years for the Bengals and was selected by the hall’s senior committee for the 2023 class.
“After 25 years, I’m getting a teammate in,” said Munoz, who was elected in 1998 in his first year of eligibility.
Munoz would like another, and he hopes it is Anderson, the Batavia native who played 16 seasons at quarterback for Cincinnati from 1971 to 1986.
Anderson has come close.
He was one of 15 finalists in 1996 and 1998 but didn’t receive the needed 80% of the votes from the 50-member selection committee.
Last year, Anderson made the final 12 chosen by the senior committee. He recently learned he’s a semifinalist for the 2024 class and will find out Thursday if he’s again reached the final 12.
If and when he gets the call?
“We’ll have a party in Batavia,” Anderson said.
Anderson, who completed 59.3% of his passes and threw for 32,838 yards in his career, led Cincinnati to one Super Bowl, following the 1981 season and losing 26-21 to Joe Montana and San Francisco in Detroit’s Silverdome.
“I think quarterback is a unique position,” Anderson said. “I don’t think with any other position they judge you by how many Super Bowls you win, but it seems to be a key figure for quarterbacks.”
Current Sunday Night Football broadcaster Cris Collinsworth was named offensive rookie of the year after catching 67 passes for 1,009 yards that season.
“In my opinion, Anderson definitely belongs in the Hall of Fame,” Collinsworth said. “He’s arguably the purest passer I’ve ever been around. The ball was always a perfect spiral and his location was like a Tom Glavine pitch — always on the money, in the right place.
“And he was probably one of the smartest quarterbacks I’ve know. You have to wonder if Bill Walsh had stayed and gotten the head coaching job how things would have gone.”
Walsh was Anderson’s coach at the start of his career and ran the Cincinnati offense that later became the West Coast offense.
“Maybe it would have become the Midwest offense,” Munoz mused. “It’s amazing how many of the guys who have run that offense watched videos of Ken Anderson to learn it. All the guys on the 49ers did.”
Anderson’s 91-81 record as a starter is better than Hall of Fame selections Dan Fouts and Roger Staubach. And Fouts didn’t win a Super Bowl, either.
“He was a little bit after me,” Anderson said. “I played in a dead ball era where you didn’t throw as much. That was a big part of my career. Dan (Fouts) has gaudy statistics.
“I don’t know if they’ll put two Bengals in back to back, so I don’t think it looks really good for this year either.”
Speedster Isaac Curtis, a model of consistency with 7,101 receiving yards during a 12-year career from 1973 to 1984, can’t believe the omission.
“I’m just surprised Ken is not in at this point with the career he had,” Curtis said. “He certainly has the credits to be in there.
“Remember, that was an era where the quarterback isn’t protected like today. He took a beating sometimes.”
Anderson won four passing titles and ran for 2,200 yards in his career. He made the Pro Bowl four times.
At the time of his retirement, Anderson held records for most consecutive completions with 20, completion percentage for a single game at 91% (20 of 22) and season completion percentage at 70.6% in 1982.
Making the Hall of Fame would be a fitting final chapter for Anderson, who wrote one of the more remarkable NFL success stories.
He was a three-sport standout in high school for Batavia. Anderson played basketball alongside next door neighbor Dan Issel, who had a 15-year career in the ABA and NBA before being inducted into the Naismith Hall of Fame in 1993.
Growing up in the same neighborhood was Byron Von Hoff, a pitcher drafted in the first round by the New York Mets who had a promising baseball career cut short by an arm injury.
Anderson said he went to Augustana to play basketball, his favorite sport, and baseball, which he thought was his best. His high school coach, Bill Day, convinced him to try football.
“I still have a copy of the letter I wrote the coach, dated June 28 that year before I went to school,” Anderson said.
By the third week, he was starting. When Anderson was a junior, Walsh scouted him for the Bengals. Anderson was then taken in the third round of the NFL draft, which was held in January at that time.
It was the same year Jim Plunkett, Archie Manning and Dan Pastorini went 1-2-3 in a draft class that included Lynn Dickey and Joe Theismann.
“Later, Sports Illustrated did a story about the class,” Anderson recalled. “Plunkett, who struggled at New England and San Francisco before getting to Oakland, said, ‘Kenny was the lucky one, going to Cincinnati, a strong franchise with Paul Brown and Bill Walsh.’
“I was very fortunate. My career probably would have been very brief if I wouldn’t have had a coach like Bill Walsh.”
