McNabb now a Redskin

Nope.

Actually, Rivers did. (He’s led them to the playoffs four years running, all four years he’s been a starter.) So the list is Brady, Rivers and the Manning brothers.

I will admit that Eli’s on-field body language turns me off, so your calling me out on my lack of objectivity is correct. As far as having a good feeling about him, as a Steeler fan, I can relate, since I wouldn’t trade Ben for anyone either. Eli is your guy? No problem with me.

Jimmy Chitwood, I’m not trying to back into a reasonable position to placate you. Using an example that was clearly misunderstood by most who are reading this thread indicated that I didn’t express myself very clearly. So, I tried to explain it from a different angle. But I am comfortable with my assessment of McNabb. Based on your comments, I made the assumption of your position(s). My mistake.

A question for you. Are you an Eagles fan or a resident of the Philadelphia area? If so, do you believe that everyone that dislikes McNabb is just emotionally blind and irrational? Is it about color? Is everyone wrong because they don’t agree with your enlightened point of view?

To say:

Indicates that you haven’t read my posts with very good comprehension. I am a Steeler fan, so to believe I have a stake in the Eagles or their QB situation is a bit out there. I can have an opinion, of course. But it doesn’t keep me up nights. I don’t think the guy is a winner, plain and simple. Since I happen to live in an area where the Eagles are shown every week, I’ve watched a lot of Eagle games and a lot of McNabb. I will not miss him one bit. So, my glee stems from that fact and that alone. If he takes the 'skins to the Super Bowl, like I said, I’ll be happy to eat my bowl of crow.

On a general note, do you not think that some guys have it and some guys don’t? Some guys are winners and some guys aren’t? It’s not a physical thing. It’s between the ears.

Peyton Manning is someone I’ve always watched with interest because until he won a Super Bowl, I thought he was going to be one of those guys that was just unable to do it. My opinion formed when he was in college and couldn’t win a national championship with Tennessee. The year after he left, Tennessee won the national championship with Tee Martin, not exactly the greatest college QB ever.

I look at Peyton as a great regular season QB, but an average post season QB. He puts up fabulous numbers. He’s amazing to watch. As a Colts fan, I wouldn’t trade him for the world. But last season, Drew Brees seemed to will the Saints to win. That’s something you can’t teach, and that’s something McNabb ever had.

Of course, I don’t work for any NFL team, and realize my opinions are worth what you are paying for them. :smiley:
And just a comment on Dan Marino. I don’t think he sucked. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of one running back from his years in Miami. I think that was a big problem for the Dolphins. Marino was great, but his finger is definitely missing a ring. But his stats are amazing, and he is HOF worthy.

The lack of running backs was partly Marino’s fault, as he lobbied against emphasizing the running game.

Yes, yes, depends on what you mean by dislikes, sometimes, only the irrational ones.

That’s one possibility. The other is that your first post to the thread included the following:

Yeah, no, you’re right, why did I think you were strangely personally invested in this?

I think this sums up our differences perfectly. You are a rabid NY fan and incapable of objective thought. The fact a guy plays on the team you like, makes him better than anyone else, SIMPLY BECAUSE HE PLAYS ON YOUR TEAM. Me, I realize there is a world beyond my fandom, called reality. I can make judgments about players based not only on who they play for, but based on whether thay are good football players. To you, “fan credibility” means a complete loss of intelligence and objectivity in favor for rabid support of whoever wears your colors. Had you put forth a compelling argument that Eli is snort a better snort quarterback than Brad… I’m sorry, I can’t even keep a straight face while typing that out. But you get what I mean. Or maybe you don’t, since I’m not a Giant or a Jet.

I had not realized just how much you put the “fanatic” into fan. Now I know.

LOL! The only way I am “personally invested” in this topic is in revisiting this at the end of the season.

I stand by everything you quoted in my first post. My poking at some of his most annoying habits, including misfiring on the short crossing route (a key to a successful west coast offensive attack) his continually expanding waste line, and his sideline antics, even if cheap shots, are all true. I think Big Ben has put on some major weight too, and has some interesting ideas about how to treat women.

So tell me, Jimmy Chitwood… you are an Eagle fan and you live in the Philly area. Give me your opinion of McNabb. You say that trading him wasn’t a bad idea, but how can that be? If he’s a franchise QB, trading one is the dumbest thing the Eagles could have done. So break McNabb down, and tell me what you think.

If you think that all white people in Philly hate McNabb because he’s black, I don’t think that’s the case. I’m sure there are some out there that look at that sort of thing, but it’s not the norm.

McNabb had a brief press conference the other day where he spoke specifically to Stink Fish Pot and his criticisms.

If pointing out that you said you couldn’t wait for McNabb to fail spectacularly isn’t an indication that you considered it a personal issue, I don’t know what else to tell you. I guess I was mistaken.

Well, all right, you asked for it. First, I haven’t said anything at all about race, and nobody said anything like “all white people hate McNabb because he’s black,” so once again I just have to respond that you’re assigning me a position. I’m not a mindreader; I can’t tell why people have irrational assessments of the guy. Just whether they do.

Second, “franchise QB” is not something that means much to me, so that’s also not something that I’ve claimed. It’s another post-hoc bit of narrative fluff that I think is synonymous with “speaker thinks he is a good player.” The reasons why a trade was reasonable are self-evident. He’s 33 and they invested in his replacement, who they think has the ability to step in. You don’t draft a quarterback thinking that he’s good enough to be your starter for a long time and then leave him sitting on the bench for four seasons. A quarterback doesn’t have to have a magic curse on his soul that makes him Not A Winner for it to be reasonable to trade him when you’re ready to move in a different direction.

Now, breaking McNabb down now that he’s actually finished his body of work here. I think he’s been more or less the same guy the whole time he was here – very good, always one of the best, say, six quarterbacks in the game in any given year, but prone to stretches of ineffectiveness and never the best or second best. He was the quarterback on a team that was consistently at the top of the league in offense despite 1. perpetually failing to run the ball when he was healthy, 2. never giving him great players on offense, and 3. asking him to run an offense that emphasized his weakness and downplayed some of his strengths (I think he would have run Roethlisberger’s pre-2009 offense far better than Roethlisberger, for instance).

Given that his team was constantly in the bottom fifth of the league in rushing attempts and he was always throwing the ball or getting sacked, you could very easily spin the narrative to the effect that he controlled the game, took care of the ball, didn’t turn it over, took what the defense gave him, and all that, but nobody’s interested in hearing that because he’s such a great athlete and is supposed to be a “playmaker.” So instead of crediting him for his overall effectiveness, his weaknesses became the story. His propensity to ground the ball where not even his receivers can catch it is now some kind of hilarious mental deficiency on his part rather than him just not taking chances on what have usually been lousy receivers running lousy routes as part of an offense that is just going to do the same old thing again.

Of course, he’s also below-average for a quarterback his caliber in terms of accuracy and struggles badly to make the kind of precise floaty throws that Brees and Warner make 25 times a game. He misses a lot of throws. But he doesn’t miss throws because he’s trying to force plays, and he doesn’t throw interceptions as a result of his inaccuracy. He’s careful, and always has been, even while he was being ridiculed for it. I actually think that the terrible experiences with his receivers earlier in his career turned him into a too-careful quarterback when he finally had talent around him, to be honest.

So that’s what he is, I think. A very good, not all-time great, strong-armed, smart quarterback who will never cost you the game, and can blow a good defense off the field if his receivers can get into space, but won’t if they don’t. And he’s only ever run one offense, and it was Andy Reid’s offense, and Andy Reid’s weaknesses have become McNabb’s – clock management, valuing timeouts, and all that. None of this has anything to do with him being some special brand of coward or having some spiritual deficiency that means he can’t ever win. If McNabb had gotten lucky he could have easily won multiple Super Bowls; if he got very unlucky he could have easily been to only one or two conference championships and no Super Bowl. He was still a very good player – better than a lot who have won Super Bowls, and worse than a lot of others.

mispost

Okay, I see your point now, and I guess I agree with it to a certain extent. But I think there are several things to keep in mind:

  1. Both traditional football wisdom and (admittedly limited) empirical research indicate that there is significant value to continuity on a team;

  2. Both Reid’s offense and Jim Johnson’s defenses are/were supposedly among the most complicated schemes around, and which which take multiple years to master;

  3. In the salary-cap world, you must always be thinking about how good a guy is relative to his contract, not just in general;

  4. lots of times, teams trying to upgrade themselves by replacing player A with player B end up finding out that player B just has a different set of deficiencies, or is actually even worse.
    Putting all that together, I think Reid/Banner have developed a philosophy that says it’s better to err on the side of caution be and slow in turning over your roster. Teams like the Redskins are always trying to get better by bringing in new faces every year, and it doesn’t work.

Some of the guys you listed were not, IMO, unmitigated disasters. LJ Smith was guy Eagles fans loved to hate, but he was not some complete stiff who did not belong on an NFL roster. He was/is mediocre. But a mediocre player whose strengths and weaknesses you know well, who knows the playbook, who is signed to an affordable contract, has value. Especially when you’re a perennial contender, it’s entirely defensible to prefer that guy over signing more-expensive free agent who you hope will be 10% better eventually.

A few of them … Mike McMahon was brought in as a #3 qb and was released after one year. How is he on the list? Jerome McDougle was all about the injuries.

I also note that you don’t list the guys they stuck with who developed into useful players after most people would have given up on them: Buckhalter, Avant, Mikell,

Sure, some of them clearly were guys Reid could have cut the cord on earlier; but as I said, they choose to err on the side of caution. Turn it around – can you name many guys who the Eagles cut loose, but who then went on to play much better for other people, and whom we wish we had back? I can’t think of any. I’d bet most teams couldn’t say that.

At the end of the day, all you can do is look at the results. They’ve been one of the best in the league for a decade, and that tells me his method has been right more than its been wrong, no matter how it seems to us. If he says Kolb is the man, I think he’s earned the credibility.

And if he’s wrong, he’ll be canned. :stuck_out_tongue:

BTW, Stink Fish Pot: how about you be specific about what you think McNbb will do this year.

If you want to put your money where your mouth is, I’m game to wager. You say he’ll be a disaster… I say he makes them better. How about this: we compare the 2009 and the 2010 Redskins. If their record declines, I pay you $20 for every additional loss. If it improves, you pay me $20 for every additional win.

Deal?

What I’m failing to grasp here, as a Redskins fan, is how the McNabb trade helps us become a team that routinely belongs in the playoffs. McNabb may get us to the playoffs while he’s a Redskin, but if the trade isn’t a step towards making the Redskins a quality team a few years down the road, then it just seems like a waste.

Having fewer draft choices and an aging QB who has missed more than a season’s worth of games in the past 5 years just seems to be gutting the future a tad more than we already are, in order to win a few more games this year and maybe next.

Jimmy, I just have to say: you’re a smart guy (for an Eagles fan). Great post.

Not to single you out, but I’ve always found the “build for the future” excuse for not getting quality now to be extremely simplistic. Every NFL franchise is always building to win in the future AND to win now. Franchises that focus solely on building a winner “a few years down the road” will find that road never really arriving. I can understand it in the very short term (like emphasizing the draft over free agency when you are “rebuilding”), but looking past the next 3 years in some vague hope is, to me, silly. There’s just too much unpredictability.

If the future of your franchise depends on a second round pick this year and a third round pick next year, you’re not doing your job. Of course, the way the Redskins have drafted, that may be a foregone conclusion.

McNabb is still a very good quarterback and is as old as Peyton Manning. He’s got at least 3 more very good years in him, I think.

Having McNabb will allow the offense to become more consistent at the very least. There will be stability at the QB position and the marriage of Shanahan and his staff to a QB for say 3 years will allow the Redskin to develop an identity. Those young players all over the offense will benefit from a QB that knows what he’s doing and will generally be making smart choices with the ball. WR will be able to learn the position with McNabb’s help and they’ll actually see the ball delivered on time and to the right read. O Lineman will be able to sustain blocks knowing where the QB will be and having a QB who knows to get the ball out on time will allow them to grow and understand the timing that an offense is supposed to have. The running backs will benefit from balance on offense and a reduced workload.

McNabb doesn’t have to take them deep into the playoffs to be valuable. Having a rookie QB in there turtling up in the pocket and slinging the ball all over the yard without aim does nothing to help the young guys develop. Having a offense that shuffles QBs and gets it’s OCs shitcanned retards the development of the young players in the system, McNabb will prevent that.

The Redskins have a couple young WRs and TEs, actually catching passes will be very valuable for them. Having a system that runs more smoothly than plays drawn up in the sand will be instructive.

And let’s face it, there’s a non-zero chance that McNabb could take them deep into the playoffs. The list of NFL teams with drastic and immediate turn arounds is long and the one thing they have in common is steady QB play.

McNabb makes the Redskins a better team today and tomorrow. The price was very tolerable. In no way did they mortgage the future unless you are convinced that 2nd rounder was going to be the next Walter Payton.

Sean Dawkins?

shrugs

Brian Dawkins? He went to 8 Pro Bowls for the Eagles and was a member of the All-Decade team for the 00s, so while he’s continued to play well in Denver it’s not as though they didn’t get their money’s worth.

The Iggles are very good at dumping players on time. Hugh Douglas and Jeremiah Trotter fell apart after leaving the team for big free-agent money.

Yeah, they’re very good at dumping older guys just before they drop off - Troy Vincent, Bobby Taylor, Carlos Emmons, Douglas. Even Dawkins, since he really wasn’t playing the position that well in the Eagles system (that his replacements played it even worse is something the Eagles do not deserve credit for). I don’t know that Trotter’s one of those examples, though – they brought him back later because they’d been hurting for a guy to do his job, and he was still more or less the same player. I’d say that what did happen is that he turned out not to be worth that much more than the Eagles were willing to pay them (i.e. what the Skins did pay), so he’s a point for furt’s argument since he was a younger guy that they had evaluated correctly, even though they again failed to have an adequate plan B – the guys they had in waiting weren’t as good as they thought they were, is my argument.

I’m not sure that the number of players who go elsewhere and star is really a counter to what I’m saying, since even if there were literally none, that would certainly not do much to dispel the notion that Reid thinks his players are better than they are. The fact that Todd Pinkston didn’t play anywhere else after the Eagles were done with him, I’d say, is proof that he was a shitty player that Reid overvalued in the first place, not proof that the Eagles were doing a good job hanging on to their talent. But I do understand the point, and I do admit I’d rather McDougle stay another year than have Trent Cole depart a year before he started to dominate.

But to answer your question, furt, I think that there are examples on defense, but none on offense, so I should amend my criticism. Derrick Burgess’ 27 sacks in two years immediately post-Eagles and Al Harris’ 100 starts for the Packers come to mind. Rod Hood’s been a good player, but fairly expensive so that’s a tossup (but he’s definitely better than Joselio Hanson is). I’d certainly rather have Michael Lewis starting than Considine. So maybe instead of saying Reid overvalues his own players across the board, I should say that I think he overvalues his ability to succeed with subpar talent in certain positions. In the end it’s the same – I think his personnel decisions come from a sense that he can succeed as a coach without spending money on anybody but a corner, a tackle, a defensive lineman or a quarterback. Maybe he doesn’t think the linebackers and safeties and receivers he drafts actually are that good, but he obviously thinks they’re good enough that he can win with them. And I’d be a fool not to acknowledge that he can win a lot of games that way (and that as you point out, all things being equal it’s much better to keep a mediocre player than take a chance on a new mediocre player, even notwithstanding that a new player will cost more), but that’s the root of their long-term very-good not-greatness, in my eyes, because they just seem to never have enough really excellent players on the field. I’m absolutely certain that I don’t give them enough credit for what they do well, though, I admit it. I will never admit that LJ “Carry it Like a Loaf of Bread if you Catch It, Which You Won’t” Smith was anything but a disaster, however.

And thank you, storyteller.

I haven’t had a chance to read all the posts since my last post in this thread, but in skimming page 4, I came across this one and thought I’d reply quickly.

I think we can both agree that the Redskins will win more than 4 games this year. I am happy to admit that. Your parameters on this “wager” aren’t realistic, and do not reflect my personal opinion on how the Redskins will do this year.

A similar bet would be if you believe that McNabb is going to be such a major upgrade from Campbell, then pick a win total… how about 12? 11? What do you think their record will be? Are they making the playoffs or not? If Jason Campbell is the QB for the Redskins this year, I believe they win more than 4 games… so how about you give me an idea of how the Redskins will do this year with McNabb?

Shanahan is a significant upgrade at head coach over Jim Zorn. I can see that being worth 2-3 games on this one move alone. The Redskins also have a very good defense, and if I recall correctly, they lost a number of very close games during last season’s 4-12 record.

I’ll get back to you later with more… if I get a chance later tonight, I’ll catch up on the thread and get back on track.

Jimmy Chitwood, I’ll respond in detail later. But could you tell me what, in your opinion are ***rational ***reasons not to like McNabb? (I don’t want to talk about generalities, since this is a thread about McNabb). Can you also define what, in your mind, are ***irrational ***reasons?