In one of my last blogs, I took a lot of heat for picking (3) Miami Hurricane players (Portis, Shockey, Morgan) as the most overrated players at their position.  Just to set the record straight, I have nothing against the Miami Hurricanes.  I like the Packers, yet railed on one of my own guys as overrated.  I am not a Patriots fans and I picked two of their guys as underrated.  The problem is that Miami has produced so many great players and first round picks over the last 20 years.  They enter the pros with expectations of being a future Hall of Famer.  It was inevitable that I would pick some Miami Hurricane players as overrated.  Do you think it is any accident that all of my overrated players were high first round picks, and that my underrated players were picked in later rounds?  A lot of how you are perceived in the league is correlated with where you went to school and where you were drafted.  Teams expect more out of the first round than the seventh round. 

But as I digress, the thing that I found the most interesting is how many people took offense to me saying that Donovan McNabb was the most overrated quarterback in the league.  I found it so interesting; I thought I would devote an entire article to the topic. 

I want to clear the air with a couple of items before I give my take.  First, this position has nothing to do with me being a Packer Fan.  Please don't comment on my post that Brett Favre is past his prime, that he is overrated.  I don't need to rip on Donovan McNabb to make Brett Favre look like a better football player.  Brett Favre career wise and Donovan McNabb career wise don't even compare.  To compare Brett Favre as a 38 year old to Donovan McNabb as a 31 year old doesn't make a lot of sense either.   Second, while I do not root for the Eagles, they have one of the best run organizations in football, a fantastic head coach, and several great football players.  Remember, I did select Brian Westbrook as the most underrated running back in the NFL.

I have never understood why people rate Donovan McNabb as highly as they do.  I think the main reason is that he is a likeable guy.  In his interviews he comes off as a humble, down to earth person.  He is highly involved in the community.  He is never in trouble with the law.  He doesn't own his own dog fighting facility.  In the whole TO saga, Donovan McNabb came across as the sane person capable of taking the higher road.  TO looked like a freak show. 

The best thing you can say about anyone is that they are not only a stand up person, but a winner.  I don't dispute that.  Donovan McNabb is clearly both.  From 2001 to 2004 he was in the NFC Championship game every year.  In 2004, he broke through and went to the Super Bowl.  From 2000 to 2004 he made to Pro Bowl every year.  In that time span the Eagles averaged winning just fewer than 12 games a year. 

The problem is that Trent Dilfer is a winner as well.   Being a great quarterback and winning football games do not necessarily correlate.  Rex Grossman won the most games in the NFC this past season.  I don't think anyone is nominating him for the best quarterback in the NFC.  Now I am not dragging Donovan McNabb down to these quarterback's levels.  He is clearly better than that.  I'm just saying that I'm not anointing Donovan McNabb as an elite quarterback, simply because the Eagles have won a lot of games over the course of his career. 

Evaluating a quarterback is probably the toughest thing in sports to do.  The reason is that it isn't like baseball, which is very statistic driven.  You have to look at all these intangibles.    For instance, Troy Aikam played in 165 career games, threw for 165 touchdowns and almost 33,000 yards.  Jeff George in 133 career games threw for 154 touchdowns and 27,000 yards.  Jeff George has a career quarterback rating of 80.4.  Troy Aikam has a career rating of 81.6.  If you look just at the statistics, they are comparable players.  Anyone that watched them play knows that Troy Aikman is a first ballot Hall of Famer, a champion, part of the glue of the Dallas dynasty; while Jeff George was a locker room nightmare that played for 7 teams.  He will only get to Canton if he pays for the price of admission like the rest of us. 

Here is my problem with rating Donovan McNabb so highly.  Most of the quarterbacks that are rated as all time greats that do not have knockout statistics, instead, have multiple Super Bowls or Championships.  Troy Aikman, Tom Brady, Bob Griese, and Bart Starr are examples that come to mind.  It is understood they had the ability to put up bigger numbers, but by playing within the scheme they played in; they were able to accomplish greater team success.  Most of the quarterbacks that have 1 ring or fewer as a starter, i.e. Brett Favre, Dan Marino, Peyton Manning, Steve Young have knockout statistics.  People that tend to value team success higher will rank that first group higher.  People that value the statistics tend to rank the other group higher.   Neither method is wrong.  It's like looking at a glass half empty or half full. 

My problem is that Donovan McNabb has neither.  He has played in one Super Bowl.  He does not have a ring.   While they were a very good team from 2000 to 2004, they were never able to get over the hump.  Some will argue that was because they never game him a great wide receiver.   Some will argue that was because they never had a dominant runner.  The problem is that you can make excuses for everyone that you like, and discount everyone that you don't like.  This is the old keep the teams the same, but put Joe Montana on the Eagles and Donovan McNabb on the 49ers and see what would have happened argument.   When you do this, every great player was really terrible, and every terrible player should have been great.  In the end, all you can go with is what happened on the field. 

Everyone that is a Donovan McNabb supporter makes the same argument.  Look at what he did with TO in 2004.  If he would have had that caliber receiver his entire career, think of what he would have done.   The fact of the matter is that having a great wide receiver is far less important than having a good defense and a good running game.  Putting up great passing numbers is a product of being on the field and playing in a game that is not a blow out where the defense knows you have to throw. 

Just look at history.  Brett Favre lost his All-Pro wide receiver Sterling Sharpe in 1994 after a 33 touchdown pass season.   How did he respond?  By tossing passes to receivers like Robert Brooks and Antonio Freeman for the tune of 38, 39, 35, and 31 touchdowns for the next four seasons.  His touchdowns went down and the interceptions went up after Reggie White retired and the defense got bad, not when Sterling Sharpe retired.  John Elway played with a future Hall of Fame Tight End, but no Hall of Fame Wide Receivers.  Four of his best touchdown pass seasons came after 1995, long after Shannon Sharpe arrived.   That's when they added Terrell Davis and a stand out defense; not a talent like TO.  The best receiver Tom Brady has ever played with was Deion Branch.  His worst season since his first full year of starting is 23 touchdowns.  This argument that Donovan McNabb doesn't have good touchdown seasons because he hasn't played the majority of his career with an All-Pro Receiver gets very old to me.  He has had good running backs, and he has had a great defense.  His numbers should be better, and it isn't because of only one season with TO. 

So let's look at the statistics.  The positives for Donovan McNabb are that he has a career quarterback rating of 85.2, and has a touchdown to interception ratio of 152 to 72.  What that tells me is he has been very good at taking care of the ball.  Also, Donovan McNabb was amazing in 2004.  He had 3875 yards, 31 touchdowns against 8 interceptions, and went to the Super Bowl.  Now, let's look at the rest of his career.  He plays in a short pass, West Coast Offense.  Yet he only completes 58.2 % of his passes.  Since 2002, he has one season with more than 18 touchdown passes. 

I know people are going to scream, hey idiot, he was injured for three seasons.  Being healthy is part of the game.  Tom Brady and Peyton Manning have started every game since 2002.   So has Brett Favre.  All of the great ones were durable.  Yeah, Joe Montana had the back issue in 1986 where he played only 8 games.  He missed that many the next four years.  Even Aikman, with all his concussion issues, still managed to play at least 14 games a season from 1992 to 1997.  Steve Young played 16 games for 3 straight seasons from 1992 to 1994. 

Great quarterbacks become great by being on the field and making plays.  You can't say, "Well he would have thrown 30 touchdowns if he hadn't gotten hurt."  "The Eagles would have won the Super Bowl had he stayed healthy."  "That offense was really dangerous the first 5 weeks of the season."  In the end, the numbers are what they are. 

Donovan McNabb will be 31 years old this November.  At the beginning of the 2002 season he was 25 years old.   Those are supposed to be the prime years of a quarterback's career.  In that time frame, he has started, on average, 12 games per season.  In 03 and 04 he started 31 games.  That tells you what happened in the other 3 seasons.  I'm not saying that he isn't tough, or that he could have played those games, and chose not to.  I'm just saying that for whatever the reason he isn't very durable.  Part of being an elite quarterback is being durable. 

The other thing I'm saying is that if you look at the seasons he played at least 14 games, that with the exception of 2004, the numbers aren't that great.    2000 and 2001 are probably his next best seasons.  Neither were over 3500 yards.  He had 21 touchdowns and 25 touchdowns.   Good numbers, but nothing out of this world.  2003 he had less than 3500 yards, 16 touchdowns, and 11 interceptions.  That's awful for a quarterback in the prime of his career.  After that I can't examine anything, because there aren't any other seasons where he started more than ten games. 

Obviously I'm not the only one thinking that.  The Eagles spent a 2nd round pick, (their first pick of this draft) on a quarterback from Houston.  A lot of teams do pick a quarterback high at the end of an elite quarterback's career.  It usually doesn't happen at age 31.  The fact of the matter is that the Eagles are sick of having to either cancel their season or turn to a 36 year old backup in November, because their star quarterback is on IR. 

So, to recap is it really unfair to ask why a 31 year old quarterback who has one 3,800 yard season, one season of over 30 touchdown passes, has never won a Super Bowl, and has consistently showed that he is unable to play a 16 game schedule is constantly mentioned in the same breath as Tom Brady, winner of 3 Super Bowls and Peyton Manning, a Super Bowl Champion, who has put himself in position to rewrite the NFL passing records? 

If I were going to rate Donovan McNabb with other quarterbacks in history, I certainly would not put him in Peyton Manning or Tom Brady's group.  I would say that the 3 quarterbacks he reminds me the most of are as follows; 1) Mark Brunell, about the same rating, 182 career touchdown passes, never got over the hump with some pretty good Jaguar teams.   2) Steve McNair, about the same rating, 172 career touchdowns, never got over the hump with some good Titan teams.  Similar to McNabb he lost in a competitive Super Bowl to a better team, 3) Ron Jaworski, career 53.0% passer, lost a Super Bowl, 179 career touchdown passes. 

These are all good players, who were on multiple good teams, played in the league for a number of years, had a few impressive seasons with a lot of average ones.  All three were stand up guys.  All of them will be remembered as good quarterbacks.  None of them will probably get into the Hall of Fame.  McNair and Brunell were dogged by injuries during their prime, similar to McNabb.  Jaworksi was more durable in his prime, but threw a lot more interceptions.  However, he had the same low completion percentages that McNabb has had.  But to say that McNabb is on par with the Brady and Manning of today is absurd.  To say that he is like Favre, Young, or Aikman in the nineties is ridiculous.  One who thinks that Donovan McNabb is either a great quarterback today or an all time great quarterback is choosing to remember the 2004 season, and ignore the injuries and average statistics he has had the rest of his career.