Mcnair > Favre
Posted by Little SK, April 21, 2008 - 9:58 pm
If you clicked on ESPN.com, SI.com, or any other mainstream sports site when Brett Favre retired, you might have thought that the rest of the sports world took a break from making news for a week. There’s no way you could have avoided the national schlurp fest that ensued (with only Sal Paolantonio at ESPN daring to call Favre overrated).
I’m admittedly biased against Favre. As a Cowboy fan in the 90’s, the media’s fawning over Favre coincided with the demise of my beloved dynasty. To me, his durability was all luck, and praise for his “gunslinging” ways was just code for throwing interceptions. I didn’t understand why a guy who went to rehab for poppin pills, held an entire franchise hostage with his annual retirement saga, and once took a dive for Michael Strahan’s sack record, was considered such an All American hero. I’ll probably never get it. But I don’t want to get into a long diatribe about Favre, I want to pay tribute to Steve McNair.
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If you clicked on ESPN.com, SI.com, or any other mainstream sports site during the last couple of days, you probably missed the announcement that Steve McNair is retiring. By now, it’s been buried under bullshit filler headlines about the upcoming draft, Eli Manning’s wedding and Ocho Cinco’s latest shenanigans. On top of that, his Hall of Fame candidacy is being considered “borderline”.
What a shame.
McNair gets knocked for not putting up superlative numbers, but he was the toughest quarterback I’ve ever seen. In 2002, he was so banged up he physically couldn’t practice, yet he still started the last five games of the season and led the Titans to the AFC championship game (teammate Eddie George, “In his MVP year he played most of the year hurt. It is a testament to his willingness to win and how he sacrificed his body for the team”…willingness to win, sacrificing for the team…sounds like a Hall of Famer to me). He gets knocked for never winning a Super Bowl, but he came within a Kevin Dyson stretch from getting that ring. He’s one of three quarterbacks in history to pass for over 30,000 yards (which is more than Joe Namath and Terry Bradshaw) and run for over 3,000.
Off the field, McNair’s story was much more All-American than Brett Favre’s. He and his four brothers were raised by a single mother in rural Mississippi (being black and poor in Mississippi isn’t exactly the ticket to success that being white with a football coach for a father is). When the news cameras were all over Peyton and Eli Manning loading trucks bound for Hurricane Katrina evacuees, McNair had already sent the first of over 20 trucks full of food and supplies to Southern Mississippi. In 12 hours, he had collected over $50,000 for Katrina victims, and to date his foundation has raised over $250,000.
Hopefully over time, Hall of Fame voters, and football fans in general, will come around to giving McNair his due. It would truly be a shame if someone who consistently played hard on the field, and was a true role model off of it, doesn’t get the recognition he deserves.
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