Duke Carlisle never took a snap in a Green Bay regular-season game, but his name still sits in the Packers’ draft ledger from the peak of the Vince Lombardi years.
The former Texas quarterback, selected by Green Bay in the fifth round of the 1964 NFL Draft, died Friday in Lockhart, Texas, at 84 after a seven-year fight with lung cancer.
Born Emmet Augustus Carlisle III in Kaufman on December 13, 1941, and raised in Athens, he arrived in Green Bay as a proven winner rather than a project. Under Darrell Royal he had started the Longhorns to a 30-2-1 record, three Southwest Conference titles, and the program’s first national championship.
The 1963 team went 11-0. Carlisle, an Academic All-American and the team’s MVP that season, was as valuable on defense as he was under center.
Late in a 7-3 win over Baylor, he intercepted a pass in the end zone and preserved an undefeated season that was still hanging by a thread.
His last college game is the one Packers scouts would have circled. In the 1964 Cotton Bowl, Texas faced Navy and Heisman Trophy winner Roger Staubach.
Carlisle threw for 213 yards and two touchdowns and ran for another as the Longhorns won 28-6. He left Dallas as the game’s outstanding back, with Cotton Bowl records that helped place him, decades later, in both the Texas Hall of Honor and the Cotton Bowl Hall of Fame.
Green Bay took him 60th overall. The Kansas City Chiefs had already claimed him in the AFL draft. He also spent time in the Dallas Cowboys’ orbit that offseason. None of it produced a regular-season appearance.
An injury ended the playing career before it really began, and Carlisle went home. He finished a graduate degree, then built a second life in investment banking and the oil business in Texas.
He and his wife, Emily, were married 62 years. They had two daughters, Kathy and Eloise.
In 1964 the Packers were not hunting a starter. Bart Starr already had a championship, and another was coming.
A fifth-round quarterback from a perfect Texas team was depth, a camp arm, the sort of name that fills a roster sheet and then disappears. Carlisle disappeared from the league, not from the record.
He remains one of four Longhorn quarterbacks to win a national title, alongside James Street, Eddie Phillips, and Vince Young.
For Green Bay the connection is brief and mostly archival: a Lombardi-era draft pick whose football life was already complete by the time he reached Wisconsin.
The championship he actually won was in burnt orange, on a January afternoon against Staubach, not under the lights at Lambeau. That does not make the line in the Packers’ draft history any less real. It only explains why so few people in Green Bay ever got to see him throw.
