Sorry for the hiatus. I am back – it won’t happen again. I promise.
OK. A couple of quick notes. I know it’s old news, but I should make a point to re-post, every few months, what I originally wrote for the Gadflyer about Rush Limbaugh’s short-lived stint at ESPN and his firing after comments he made about Donovan McNabb.
That’s because there are people out there who continue to repeat Limbaugh’s own defense of his comments, which was that he wasn’t making a comment about race, but instead about the media. The latest to do this was 620 the Bull’s Joe Ovious. On Friday morning, in discussing sports commentators getting in hot water recently, Ovious recalled Limbaugh’s remarks and insisted that “what a lot of people don’t remember is that Limbaugh was really talking about the media.” In writing recently about Bobby Knight’s recent “chin-raising” of one of his own players, I noted that many of his media defenders argued that he was being judged unfairly because of his prior record. Of course, everybody gets judged by their prior record. And, when it comes to remarks about race, no one deserves greater scrutiny in light of his prior record than Limbaugh, who has turned resentments of various sorts, including racial resentments, into huge ratings and professional success.
In any event, until sports media folks stop mindlessly repeating Limbaugh’s defense of his comments, I’ll do my small part by continuing to remind everyone why Limbaugh should not be taken at his word:
“Since 'tis the Super
Bowl season, and since Donovan McNabb is quarterbacking one of this year's
entrants, I wanted to re-visit the comments that then-ESPN commentator Rush
Limbaugh made about McNabb in the Fall of 2003. According to Media Matters,
Rush recently fielded a phone call in which he acknowledged that McNabb had had
a great 2004 season, but stood by his comments, made early in the 2003 season.
Here's what Limbaugh said in 2003:
"He's overrated…I think what we've had here is a little social concern in
the NFL. The media has been very desirous that a black quarterback do
well…There is a little hope invested in McNabb, and he got a lot of credit for
the performance of this team that he didn't deserve. The defense carried this
team."
A firestorm erupted after this comment, prompting ESPN to end the short-lived
Limbaugh experiment. ESPN's cravenness aside (what did they expect him to do on
the program?), the implication of Limbaugh's claim is this: that white quarterbacks
have not gotten undue credit for the play of their team's defenses. You know,
that unlike Blacks, white men sink or swim on their merits. Is this true with
regard to quarterbacks?
Let's start by talking about John Shaffer. Shaffer was the quarterback at Penn
State University in 1986 when that school won its second national championship,
after upsetting the University of Miami in the Fiesta Bowl on New Year's night,
1987. Shaffer was lionized (sorry for the pun) for his grit and his winning
ways, and it was common to hear people refer to the great won-loss records of
his teams going back to the seventh grade. But, here's the dirty little secret
about Shaffer: he sucked. Big time. For his college career, he completed fewer
than half his passes and threw more interceptions than touchdowns. That's a
frankly pathetic record for a quarterback at an elite school surrounded by
future NFL players. In the championship game itself, Shaffer threw for 53
yards, a laughably low total. The reason that Penn
State won was their defense, which was
great all season and intercepted Miami's
Heisman trophy winning quarterback, Vinny Testaverde, five times in the
championship game. Shaffer, by the way, is white.
How about a couple of other examples? Tom Brady, now deified as the second
coming of Joe Montana, won the most valuable player three years ago in Super
Bowl XXXVI, the Patriots' first championship. Why? Well, Brady threw for 145
yards in that game. That's one of the lowest totals in Super Bowl history for a
winning quarterback, and the second lowest in the last thirty years. True,
Brady led the Patriots on a nice game-winning field goal drive in the final
minute. But, the real story of the game was the Patriots' defense, which held
the high-scoring St. Louis
Rams to just 17 points. Brady, by the way, is also white. So is Jim McMahon, a
good, tough QB who happened to lead the offense of the 1985 Chicago Bears, a
team that had perhaps the most ferocious defense in football history; McMahon
got credit as a "winner," of course, and as the heart, soul and
leader of that team, though his statistical performances never put him among
the NFL's elite quarterbacks. Let me assure you, there are many more examples
to choose from.
Here's the point: quarterbacks have always gotten credit even when their
performances were mediocre or worse but they happened to play on teams with
great defenses.
For guys like Limbaugh, it's not slavery or Jim Crow that constitute among the
greatest crimes in American history. No, it's the liberal response to those
crimes that really imperils our civilization. From this warped historical
perspective, it often follows that ill-informed, frankly cowardly race-baiting
is dressed up as a courageous rejection of political correctness. The fact is
that McNabb was a good quarterback when Limbaugh made his comments. Actually,
as Salon.com's great sports columnist King Kaufman pointed out at the time,
according to Football Prospectus, McNabb was the best QB in the NFL in 2002,
using a purely statistical analysis that did not consider skin-color. But, the
larger issue is that because of the nature of the sport, quarterbacks have
often gotten credit for team performances that had little or nothing to do with
their own talents. Limbaugh's fantasy quarterback meritocracy, like the larger
white meritocracy he's certain existed before 1965 or so, is a canard. The only
reason McNabb got singled out for the same treatment that white quarterbacks
have always gotten is that he's Black. This isn't a "media" issue, as
Limbaugh has maintained. It's a Limbaugh issue.
If you can't decide who to root for on Sunday, you can put that in your pocket.”
So there.
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