Wednesday, October 07, 2009

Hey, Remember When Donovan McNabb Was a Washed Up Racist?

With McNabb ready to come back to the Iggles, and news that Rush Limbaugh is pursuing his own "NFL" franchise (I'm legally required to put NFL in quotes when discussing the current St. Louis Rams), let's take a trip in the Way Back Machine.

This time, kids, we are going all the way back to September 2007--a full four years after Rush Limbaugh went on TV and declared that McNabb was getting accolades not for his numbers (which even way back then were impressive) but because he was black. ESPN was shocked, shocked!, I tell you by the fact that the racist idiot they hired to spout racist idiocy had actually spouted racist idiocy and quickly fired Limbaugh.

So, back to 2007--McNabb was coming off a knee injury. He gave an interview in which he said that black quarterbacks have a harder time staying in their chosen position than white quarterbacks, and they faced greater scrutiny.

Remember that? Remember Gregg Doyel's reaction? I do! And I'd like to remember it with you:

Here's a Doyel quote from back then:
McNabb is myopic. He thinks he has it rough? Try being Rex Grossman, the quarterback of the Chicago Bears, who gets ripped even as he is leading the Bears to the Super Bowl. The next two most critiqued quarterbacks in the NFL are probably the Jets' Chad Pennington and the Giants' Eli Manning. All three are white.

Rex Grossman is still kind of in the NFL. Chad Pennington has had yet another season-ending injury, and Eli Manning is now the highest paid Quarterback in the league. Neat. Just about all of which we could have predicted with some success in 2007. Also neat.

Here's my favorite Doyel quote from 2007, though:
McNabb? He's old and fading

Apparently, Gregg Doyel of 2007 didn't see the season of 2008. Or what I expect to be a very good second 2/3rds of 2009. And 2010.

My point mainly is that Greg Doyel isn't always wrong. He's just so close to "always wrong" that it is too hard to measure the difference. It's like a Quantum State of correctness. Quantum theory states that given enough chances, you could probably push your hand through a wall, without interacting with the molecules in the wall itself. But the odds are so low, that it would probably take you 5 billion years of trying to do it. That's Gregg Doyel.

1 comment:

Andrew Wice said...

Who the fuck is Gregg Doyel?