By every standard measurement Steve McNair is a mediocre quarterback. Wait. Can I say that? May I call McNair a great athlete without insulting him?
“I’m the type of guy who won’t let it bother me,” McNair said.
Whew. With McNair’s permission, I shall continue. This is a sensitive issue. How to critique the man who may be the poorest quarterback to start a Super Bowl since Miami’s David Woodley, a man who is worse than the Bears’ Shane Matthews, if only slightly, in the official ratings this season, and for McNair’s career far behind such journeymen as Neil O’Donnell, his own teammate and disaster replacement.
How to do this without calling attention to the historical and social significance of McNair, which is to say he will be the first quarterback to start a Super Bowl suffering from turf toe. I do not want to offend any turf-toe sufferers by belittling the injury, which can be very painful and can cause laughter on the dance floor. Nor do I want to make so much of it that it becomes a bigger story than it is.
These are the delicate lines of modern sports commentary.
“Steve is a football player,” Tennessee coach Jeff Fisher explained when asked to define what kind of quarterback McNair is.
This is, I suspect, dangerously close to forbidden stereotyping. And by McNair’s greatest booster since McNair arrived out of little Alcorn State five years ago, having battled just this sort of opinion in not winning the Heisman Trophy, something McNair still counts as one of his career tribulations.
Not being able to play quarterback for a major school is another enduring gripe. Places like Notre Dame, Florida and LSU wanted him to be a defensive back, he says. Only Alcorn State would let him play quarterback, although the admissions office might have had more to say about this than the coaches. He was, in short, Daunte Culpepper before Daunte Culpepper.
On the Heisman thing, I have some sympathy for McNair because the ’94 Heisman was won by Rashaan Salaam and McNair finished behind Ki-Jana Carter as well. If the vote could be retaken, however, I would recast mine for Warren Sapp, a subsequent and enduring force in the NFL.
“I’m all about moving on,” McNair said.
Well, then, let us do it. McNair has been the starting quarterback–er, excuse me, football player–for the Tennessee Titans for three of his five years in the league. This is normal, routine greening time for a very difficult position, roughly the same schedule Joe Montana followed.
Yet McNair’s cautious progress has been viewed as (1) evidence that he cannot be trusted (2) he is as thick as a seawall (3) he is still being victimized because of his background: small school, inferior competition.
“Those first two years,” McNair said, “things were just a blur to me. And then they started to slow down. When I first came out, I wanted to throw 50, 60, 100 times a game.
“If I can reflect now, I’m very glad things worked out as they did. A quarterback has got to know everything, upside down and inside out. I’m all about winning, regardless of the numbers I put up.”
Here we get back to impartial, agenda-less ratings. In a ball-control offense, McNair completes only slightly more passes than he doesn’t. He gets sacked a lot. And he threw barely a fourth the number of touchdown passes as did Kurt Warner, his Super Bowl opponent, who came further out of nowhere and more recently than did McNair.
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St. Louis is not as careless as was Jacksonville in publicly daring McNair to beat them, although the strategy will be same. Every team that plays Tennessee takes its chances on McNair rather than on running back Eddie George, who won the Heisman the year after McNair did not.
“Respect comes when you perform well consistently,” McNair said.
McNair makes bad decisions, but he can turn a play he has botched into a game-breaker. McNair can throw passes that look like they have turf toe and then whip a winner as smoothly and surely as any highlight film could want.
“We’re all about moving the chains,” McNair said.
McNair may not be built for the long haul. Nor is he likely to be much copied. McNair may never be the classic drop-back, finesse quarterback nearly every coach wants. And no quarterback of his type–Bobby Douglass comes to mind–has had either a successful or a long career.
But for the next game, on the most important afternoon of his life, McNair’s singular and matchless talent could be the difference between losing and not.
“I’m all about fighting the odds,” McNair said.