other one<\/a> I didn’t want to involve myself\u00c2\u00a0in at that time, so I responded with what amounted to a punt, the response “I agree that Aaron Brooks sucks.”<\/p>\nApparently there is a sentiment out there that black quarterbacks are being over-hyped and given the benefit of the doubt whereas White Quarterbacks are being unfairly burdened with criticism.\u00c2\u00a0 Rush Limbaugh is the most visible proponent of this.\u00c2\u00a0 This commenter has followed this one opinion up, and has brought Aaron Brooks into the equation.<\/p>\n
But looking at the comment, I’m left with the complication that even Aaron Brooks brings to this equation.\u00c2\u00a0 His case against Aaron Brooks is that the New Orleans Saints became better this season once the team dumped him, exiled him to the Oakland\u00c2\u00a0Raiders, whose offense is probably the worst unit in professional football.\u00c2\u00a0 Not to celebrate the career of\u00c2\u00a0 Aaron Brooks, but the season before he became the starting quarterback, the team was 2-14.\u00c2\u00a0 The year he became the starting quarterback, the team was 10-6, and then winner of their first playoff game in franchise history — the details of this season’s comment about this being just the second playoff victory in New Orleans team history.<\/p>\n
For me, what defines Aaron Brooks’s career is two seasons that eerily\u00c2\u00a0mirrored each other — one being an anomolie, two being a pattern.\u00c2\u00a0 12\u00c2\u00a0 games saw the Saints rolling along, play-off contenders, to records of\u00c2\u00a0 about 8-4.\u00c2\u00a0 Then, the bottom fell out completely, and he lead the team\u00c2\u00a0 to four straight blow-out losses.\u00c2\u00a0 Hence, Aaron Brooks sucks.\u00c2\u00a0 And nobody ever said he was terribly great.<\/p>\n
But he was legitimately thought of as good, the savior for the Saints for a spell.\u00c2\u00a0 The nature of the NFL is that pretty much every quarterback shows enough flashes so that they’re considered potentially the answer to a teams’ prayers.\u00c2\u00a0 When they fall out of favour, they will more than likely get a second chance to redeem themselves.<\/p>\n
Take Jeff Garcia.\u00c2\u00a0 If I extend the logic of this reasoning to Donvan\u00c2\u00a0 McNabb, the latest example of the “Patrick Ewing Rule”, the superstar\u00c2\u00a0falling to injury and the team improving — here under the tutelege of quarterback Jeff Garcia.\u00c2\u00a0 In a previous life, such as at the beginning of the season and the past couple of seasons with the Cleveland Browns and his final season or so with the San Francisco 49ers, he was considered a not particularly good quarterback.\u00c2\u00a0 His pro-bowl seasons with the 49ers, extending the reign of the 49ers if not to the level of Montana\u00c2\u00a0and Young then at least coating over a hollowed out franchise, were long forgotten by a fickle public.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n
Rush Limbaugh had to have been the world’s biggest Jeff Garcia fan.\u00c2\u00a0 He probably hoped that Garcia would lead the Eagles to the Superbowl, thus feeling a degree of vindication — undeserved though it would have been — about his comments about McNabb being overhyped for the sake of political correctness.<\/p>\n
I don’t feel inclined to track us back to the careers of Randall
\nCunningham and Warren Moon.\u00c2\u00a0 Warren Moon at least breaks us away from the sterotypical black quarterback, the “athletic running quarterback” whose running makes up for some relative defeciencies with passing.\u00c2\u00a0 Listing this type of quarterback — and the inherent problems of this quarterback
\n— injury proned and tending to hit a wall where they either need to adapt to more conventional quarterback play or not advance in terms of the career, you stop in the middle of the list, realize you’re listing black quarterbacks, and so toss in “Jake Plummer”.<\/p>\n
Michael Vick, mentioned here as someone who’s done nothing but is still hyped up, and thus I guess another example of the Black Quarterback who we want to believe in, is an extreme example of the problem.\u00c2\u00a0 Supposedly he’s “Redefining the position of quarterback”, somebody as easily shuntering the traditional role of quarterback to become a defacto running back.\u00c2\u00a0 And in doing so, shows the limitations of this”changing the role”, a style of play that devolves into a gimmick — and one that doesn’t age well.\u00c2\u00a0 He was a legitimate pro-bowl selection a couple of years ago, as good as any with his selection last year, and justifiably passed over this year — not that anyone cares about the pro-bowl.\u00c2\u00a0 His career high-lights remain largely single-handedly winning a playoff game at Lambeu Field — the only visitor to do so — and any number of spectacular Sports Center highlights.\u00c2\u00a0 Do Not Pass Go.<\/p>\n
Steve McNair?\u00c2\u00a0 After a highly productive career with the Tennesse Titans (and Oilers) — with a Superbowl appearance and an MVP selection in hand — he has been hopped over to the Baltimore Ravens.\u00c2\u00a0 And it is difficult to find a better quarterback who can give that team as good a chance at the Superbowl as McNair, giving the defense enough breathing room as the brilliant minimalist quarterback Trent Dilfer did a few years’ ago (passed over for Elvis Grbac, who had just had a season with healthy stats for a 6-10 team, and was thus mistakenly thought of as an upgrade).\u00c2\u00a0 The game of inches did him in, and the call of him “choking” would be as moot as the criticism levelled at Rex Grossman if a single touchdown had been pulled through.\u00c2\u00a0 In Rex Grossman’s case, he would not be “the least accomplished quarterback to appear in a Superbowl” but would instead fall into line behind luminaries such as Jeff Hostetler and the aforementioned brillaint minimalist Trent Dilfer as\u00c2\u00a0— not exactly Hall of Fame contending\u00c2\u00a0quarterbacks who managed their offense well in the Superbowl to a victory.\u00c2\u00a0 And\u00c2\u00a0McNair would have probably had the Ravens in the Superbowl, defeating the Bears, and thus not “a choke artist”.<\/p>\n
The argument proferred about Grossman is that “this is his first full year”.\u00c2\u00a0 Which only suggests he may be better in the future, and doesn’t take into account that … he had a few games where he was beyond awful.\u00c2\u00a0 The Superbowl wasn’t one of them — in that game, he fell short of those depths and was just bad.\u00c2\u00a0 Come back next season, I guess.<\/p>\n
There.\u00c2\u00a0 I’m done with this topic.\u00c2\u00a0 I think.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
“Quarterback Rex Grossman is one of the least-accomplished quarterbacks to make the Super Bowl, and played down to his reputation by concluding every comeback attempt with an incompletion or interception.” …………….. “But conservative talk-show host Rush Limbaugh had his own incendiary take. “The media, the sports media, has got social concerns that they are first […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2076","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2076","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2076"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2076\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2076"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2076"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2076"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}