Salon

sports nut


Rush Limbaugh Was Right
Donovan McNabb isn't a great quarterback, and the media do overrate
him because he is black.
By Allen Barra
Posted Thursday, October 2, 2003, at 3:33 PM PT



Limbaugh leaves over unfair football flap

In his notorious ESPN comments last Sunday night, Rush Limbaugh said
he never thought the Philadelphia Eagles' Donovan McNabb was "that
good of a quarterback."

If Limbaugh were a more astute analyst, he would have been even
harsher and said, "Donovan McNabb is barely a mediocre quarterback."
But other than that, Limbaugh pretty much spoke the truth. Limbaugh
lost his job for saying in public what many football fans and analysts
have been saying privately for the past couple of seasons.

Let's review: McNabb, he said, is "overrated ... what we have here is
a little social concern in the NFL. The media has been very desirous
that a black quarterback can do well—black coaches and black
quarterbacks doing well."

"There's a little hope invested in McNabb, and he got a lot of credit
for the performance of his team that he didn't deserve. The defense
carried this team."

Let's take the football stuff first. For the past four seasons, the
Philadelphia Eagles have had one of the best defenses in the National
Football League and have failed to make it to the Super Bowl primarily
because of an ineffective offense—an offense run by Donovan McNabb.
McNabb was a great college quarterback, in my estimation one of the
best of the '90s while at Syracuse. (For the record, I helped persuade
ESPN Magazine, then called ESPN Total Sports, to put him on the cover
of the 1998 college-football preview issue.) He is one of the most
talented athletes in the NFL, but that talent has not translated into
greatness as a pro quarterback.

McNabb has started for the Eagles since the 2000 season. In that time,
the Eagles offense has never ranked higher than 10th in the league in
yards gained. In fact, their 10th-place rank in 2002 was easily their
best; in their two previous seasons, they were 17th in a 32-team
league. They rank 31st so far in 2003.

In contrast, the Eagles defense in those four seasons has never ranked
lower than 10th in yards allowed. In 2001, they were seventh; in 2002
they were fourth; this year they're fifth. It shouldn't take a
football Einstein to see that the Eagles' strength over the past few
seasons has been on defense, and Limbaugh is no football Einstein,
which is probably why he spotted it.

The news that the Eagles defense has "carried" them over this period
should be neither surprising nor controversial to anyone with access
to simple NFL statistics—or for that matter, with access to a
television. Yet, McNabb has received an overwhelming share of media
attention and thus the credit. Now why is this?

Let's look at a quarterback with similar numbers who also plays for a
team with a great defense. I don't know anyone who would call Brad
Johnson one of the best quarterbacks in pro football—which is how
McNabb is often referred to. In fact, I don't know anyone who would
call Brad Johnson, on the evidence of his 10-year NFL career, much
more than mediocre. Yet, Johnson's NFL career passer rating, as of
last Sunday, is 7.3 points higher than McNabb's (84.8 to 77.5), he has
completed his passes at a higher rate (61.8 percent to 56.4 percent),
and has averaged significantly more yards per pass (6.84 to 5.91).
McNabb excels in just one area, running, where he has gained 2,040
yards and scored 14 touchdowns to Johnson's 467 and seven. But McNabb
has also been sacked more frequently than Johnson—more than once, on
average, per game, which negates much of the rushing advantage.

In other words, in just about every way, Brad Johnson has been a more
effective quarterback than McNabb and over a longer period.

And even if you say the stats don't matter and that a quarterback's
job is to win games, Johnson comes out ahead. Johnson has something
McNabb doesn't, a Super Bowl ring, which he went on to win after his
Bucs trounced McNabb's Eagles in last year's NFC championship game by
a score of 27-10. The Bucs and Eagles were regarded by everyone as
having the two best defenses in the NFL last year. When they played in
the championship game, the difference was that the Bucs defense
completely bottled up McNabb while the Eagles defense couldn't stop
Johnson.

In terms of performance, many NFL quarterbacks should be ranked ahead
of McNabb. But McNabb has represented something special to all of us
since he started his first game in the NFL, and we all know what that
is.

Limbaugh is being excoriated for making race an issue in the NFL. This
is hypocrisy. I don't know of a football writer who didn't regard the
dearth of black NFL quarterbacks as one of the most important issues
in the late '80s and early '90s. (The topic really caught fire after
1988, when Doug Williams of the Washington Redskins became the first
black quarterback to win a Super Bowl.)

So far, no black quarterback has been able to dominate a league in
which the majority of the players are black. To pretend that many of
us didn't want McNabb to be the best quarterback in the NFL because
he's black is absurd. To say that we shouldn't root for a quarterback
to win because he's black is every bit as nonsensical as to say that
we shouldn't have rooted for Jackie Robinson to succeed because he was
black. (Please, I don't need to be reminded that McNabb's situation is
not so difficult or important as Robinson's—I'm talking about a
principle.)

Consequently, it is equally absurd to say that the sports media
haven't overrated Donovan McNabb because he's black. I'm sorry to have
to say it; he is the quarterback for a team I root for. Instead of
calling him overrated, I wish I could be admiring his Super Bowl
rings. But the truth is that I and a great many other sportswriters
have chosen for the past few years to see McNabb as a better player
than he has been because we want him to be.

Rush Limbaugh didn't say Donovan McNabb was a bad quarterback because
he is black. He said that the media have overrated McNabb because he
is black, and Limbaugh is right. He didn't say anything that he
shouldn't have said, and in fact he said things that other
commentators should have been saying for some time now. I should have
said them myself. I mean, if they didn't hire Rush Limbaugh to say
things like this, what they did they hire him for? To talk about the
prevent defense?

Archived from group: rec>sport>football>pro