Dave Krieg went to Milton College, a tiny NAIA school in Milton, Wisconsin. He arrived as the seventh string quarterback. Not the backup. Not third on the depth chart. Seventh. In the fourth game of his freshman season, the starter got hurt and they ran out of options in front of him. Krieg went in and completed four passes. Three of them went for touchdowns. He started the rest of his college career. In 1980 he went undrafted. Every team passed on him, partly because scouts had almost nothing to go on. Milton was playing in front of a few hundred people in rural Wisconsin. Seattle gave him a tryout anyway and kept him as the third string quarterback. He played in exactly one game his rookie year. A few meaningless snaps at the end of a bad season. Two years later, in 1982, Milton College shut down entirely. Declining enrollment, no money. The school just closed. So the guy who was seventh on the depth chart at a school that no longer existed made his first NFL start in 1981 against the Jets and won it 27-23, throwing a 57 yard game winning touchdown to Steve Largent. By midseason 1983, Chuck Knox made him the starter. That year Krieg took the Seattle Seahawks to the first playoff berth in franchise history. He played 12 seasons in Seattle and 19 in the NFL. Three Pro Bowls. 213 games. 38,147 passing yards. 261 touchdowns. He rewrote the Seahawks record book and held most of those marks for decades. Only two players in NFL history ever came out of Milton College. Krieg is one of them. Back in 2019, Milton alumni held a tailgate on the old campus to honor the coaches who used to work there. Krieg showed up and asked where the name tags were. Nobody needed one to recognize him. "What brought me back to Milton was to honor our coaches," he said. "You have to think you had three coaches that took care of kids that just came from their parents, their first time away from home, and showed us the right way how to do things." Then he said the thing that sums the whole career up. "What a unique story to come from this school and make it in the NFL." The school is gone. The Ring of Honor in Seattle still has his name on it. For more stories like this, follow us on any platform @thesportsontap