I have friends all over the NFL who don’t believe Donovan McNabb gets a fair shake here in Philly. My son has numerous friends around the league, whom he played with at Stanford University, and they all to a man feel the same way.
I’ve been around here, when McNabb was blasted for his sideline behavior of sitting by himself when the defense is on the field. I’ve heard he’s not a leader because he’s not up on the sideline cheering on the defense, when the game is on the line. I saw Peyton Manning on the sideline at the end of last year’s AFC Championship game, sitting by himself with a towel over his head with the game on the line, as the New England Patriots were marching toward a possible game saving win. I heard and read this was great leadership on his part but if you put McNabb on the same sideline with the same towel over his head, he’s regarded as a loser and not a leader. Isn’t there something unfair about that double standard? I think so.
I saw Carson Palmer walking off the field fighting with his star receiver Chad Johnson on Monday Night Football. All I read from the hundreds of writers throughout the nation about the incident was that Johnson was out of control. Nobody offered any criticism of Palmer’s character or his leadership skills. Nobody asked Carson to go and corner Chad in the locker room and have it out with him. That leads me to believe that some quarterbacks and Donovan happens to be one of them, need to be able to control out of control teammates. Other quarterbacks are not required to do so.
I saw Terrell Owens call his quarterback Jeff Garcia gay and blast him constantly in the paper. You don’t hear it around Philly because the facts don’t fit the criticizing of McNabb, but Owens went after Garcia even harder than he went after McNabb. Yet you’ll be hard pressed to find one story critical of Garcia. Owens was criticized by the same media which was all over McNabb when Owens was blasting him. Yet and still, you don’t hear Garcia’s leadership questioned. To me that looks like a double standard.
The bottom line is that Donovan McNabb can’t catch a break here in Philly because criticizing him is a very popular business. I can’t say I know exactly why from a personal standpoint. Many of the other players see the double standard but they don’t want to speak up and be targeted.
Regardless of whether he is giving clichés to the media or telling people the way he really feels doesn’t matter. He was lambasted for years because he gave clichéd answers. Now that he started telling people the way he really feels, saying things like, “I’m not the whole problem with the Eagles”, the same people who were lambasting him for saying clichés, get mad at him for not saying clichés. Anybody who knows anything about football knows that a team wins and a team loses. He was simply telling the truth.
If he had said, “It all my fault”, then the same people would have said, he really doesn’t mean that, he should really tell us the truth. He said the truth and was blasted for that. No player or coach really means that when he says it, but the media decides that McNabb should have used a cliché last week.
They criticize Andy Reid for using clichés and taking all the blame each week, even though they know he really doesn’t mean it.
