From McBad to McWorse

Both the NFL network and ESPN were running the big breaking news of the day at lunch. The Redskins have decided to bench Donovan McNabb and start Rex Grossman against the Cowboys this week, wow. Everyone knew things were less than rosey when McNabb got pulled during the Lions game but this leaves absolutely no doubt that his tenure in Washington is going to be a one year experiment.

You see, when they resigned him to that large sounding 78 million dollar contract extension they also wrote in a nice little trap door that allows the Redskins to blow Donovan out after this season and only be liable for 3 million and change.  Obviously this is their way of laying the ground work to exercise that option.

Statistically, McNabb is having a pretty horrible year, the worst of his career.  To be fair it surely isn’t entirely his fault.  I think what we are seeing is the result of him being injected into a system that did not cover up his gaping flaws as much as Andy Reid did.

In Philly, Donovan had decent completion percentages and a low amount of interceptions.  However a large reason for that were the huge amount of low risk, 5 yard and under passes he was asked to throw.  He managed to throw a bunch of those into the dirt too.

Well in Washington he has been assigned making tougher, longer throws that require a decent amount of accuracy, something Eagles fans always knew he was not good at but evidently the rest of the league didn’t realize it? Anyway, he has basically been very poor in fulfilling this role.

As I mentioned when he was pulled the first time, it is a little bitter sweet to see McNabb fall from grace like this.  After all he was a big part of a lot of successful seasons in Philadelphia, even with his bad cardio, worm burners and tendency to put his foot in his mouth at times.  It will be interesting to see where he winds up.

This is also testament to the uncanny knack the Eagles front office seems to have when it comes to knowing when to part ways with veterans.  I can’t tell you how many times they cut loose veteran players that I thought were still big parts of the team, only to see that based on the performance of those same players after they were cut/traded/not resigned, it was clearly time to move on.  I can’t really think of an example of one player they cut that I wished they would have kept in retrospect except MAYBE Brian Dawkins.