Staff Blog
Donovan McNabb Hates Rules
Drew Magary, AKA Big Daddy Drew of Kissing Suzy Kolber “fame” is the recent author of the oft-hilarious Men With Balls, a mock-guidebook for athletes that I promise to review along with several other recent sports book in the pre-holiday season, pens a weekly column for Deadspin he calls the “Thursday Afternoon NFL Dick Joke Jamboro.” It’s a welcome break from hard-line NFL analysis, and the one “break” column I allow myself to read while I put together my weekly picks.
What the column is good for, usually, is a couple of snarky comments about the NFL I wish I had made myself, a lot of absurdly offensive one-liners that his audience loves and his haters see as the latest sign of the apocalypse (Buzz Bissinger’s infamous “Big Daddy Balls” rant was about Drew, a point Magary prides himself on. It’s worth noting that Bissinger and Magary have since reconciled and made public appearances together; Bissinger even blurbed Magary’s book). Occasionally the column also has an observation that perfectly true, yet could only come from the mind of someone like BDD. His breakdown of this week’s Eagles/Ravens game falls into that category:
The amazing thing about Donovan McNabb’s ignorance regarding ties isn’t that he didn’t know about them. It’s that he was genuinely ANNOYED that that was the rule. Watch that video again. The guy is fucking seething. He’s got that look that says, “I’m not gonna say anything that’ll get me in trouble, but you do realize what an outrage this is, yes?” It’s as if the existence of ties were the same to him as the existence of the Tuck Rule. Not only that, he fully expected everyone else in that room to be as surprised and angry as he was about it. Like, “Can you guys fucking believe this shit?” I’ll never get over that.
Out of all the analysis out there, this is the one that seems to hit home the most. When I mused that perhaps McNabb was bluffing, I think I was incorrectly interpreting this confused anger as taking an indignant stand. That was wrong, McNabb wasn’t worried that he would look ignorant because the rule itself was Wrong. Knowing it would drag him to that level – and that, is crazy.
