NFL 2010: How Do You Examine The Career Of Vince Young?

I’m watching a conventional Tennessee Titans game on television: Vince Young and the rest of the Tennessee offense are in shambles. There are a lot of stray passes, perhaps an interception or two.

The Tennessee defense is playing well enough to make it a close game, but Young hasn't done much to impress. He looks frustrated, head coach Jeff Fisher is irritated and yelling at the team, the wide receivers are growing lazier, the o-line is sloppy, and the only semi-encouraging thing is that the athletically furtive running back, Chris Johnson, is on the field turning the legs of the defenders into small pretzels.

When Vince Young lines up at the line of scrimmage he stares straight ahead. He looks directly into the italicized "San Diego's" and "Indianapolis's" and "New England's" in front of him. This is strange.

The NFL might appear cannibalistic and just a game for semi-idiotic people to come together to beat up and brutalize; in reality, football is just a disturbingly violent game of chess. Conniving and deceiving, game schemes dreamed up in war rooms, more of a theological battle then an athletic contest. And the generals of these battles are the quarterbacks.

The quarterbacks are the supposed smartest men on the field, and the good ones act like it.

Quarterbacks aren’t supposed to stare straight ahead as they bark out their cadences and wait for the ball; they are supposed to be looking at the coverage’s in the secondary, remarking to themselves where exactly the linebackers are lining up, looking into the whites of the defensive end’s eyes and configuring, as if mathematically, where the player will attack.

They are supposed to be singling to their wide receivers to switch their post to the hot route; they move their running backs (no more fake to the right side; instead swing to the left out into the valley between the left outside linebacker and the defensive end); and they signal to their tight ends that they need to be going over the middle.

Bad quarterbacks try to do this, but fail. Good quarterbacks do this but take too long and tip off the defense. Great quarterbacks only need a hard look and a few hand motions to achieve their goal.

Vince Young rarely does this.

What Vince Young does is look straight at the defense. Only when the ball comes to him will he then make his adjustments. On one particular play, Young gets the ball in his hand from the shotgun. The play breaks down. The offensive line, although one of the better units in the NFL, has dispersed. Two defensive linemen and a stray, blitzing, and very mean, linebacker are rushing in like river water through a dam.

Young takes a few steps back and raises his arm as if to pass the ball down the field. There is nobody open. A defensive end takes a swipe at the ball with a left beefy arm, but Young ducks. He slips around a linebacker that is tussling with his fullback and, there he goes! Sprinting down the left side of the field.

When he runs he does so with the football out in the open. This makes it way too easy for a frisky defender to simply snatch it away from him. But it is rare when that happens.

Young scoots around a rushing linebacker, and then dances his feet around a rising, athletic defensive back—his corn rows flowing out of his helmet—who goes in for the tackle and grabs his ankles, but slips off and rolls to the ground. Young barely looks back, and scampers out of the bounds twenty yards down the field from where he started.

That is a Vince Young play. A twenty or thirty second burst of speed and excitement that makes every fan watching from either the stadium seats or through the television to stop and drop their jaws and shake their heads in amazement.

The game has changed. The player before their eyes has changed. It only took one play, but Young went from the slop who could barely hit a wide-out with his feet stuck in the sand, to running through an opposing defense, and not only that, but making it look easy—near prodigy-like.

LP Field, located in Nashville, TN is the home of the Tennessee Titans. By all accounts it is an average NFL stadium, sodden in natural turf and holding just above 69,000 people.

LP Field is not a very impressive stadium, and it doesn't exhibit a very impressive team, the Titans, who, although have had success in the past, are a bleak and seemingly unimportant team in the NFL.

They do not have the logos, colors and history of those famous teams residing in Green Bay, Chicago, New York and San Francisco; they also do not have the recent on-field success of Indianapolis, San Diego or New England.

This is a team that could conceivably fade away and disappear, and not too many people outside of Tennessee would care to notice, especially if the Tennessee roster was fairly divided among the rest of the league.

The state of the Titans can be withered down to two players. One is their eccentric running back, Chris Johnson, considered by most to be the best running back in the league. Johnson is a great player.

However, he is no more then a simple anecdote to the NFL season. Although talented, but running backs are a dime a dozen, and he is no more interesting NFL commodity then hundreds of other good players that have been swallowed and spit out by the NFL system. Johnson, although immensely talented, isn't interesting enough to matter in today's game.

The same thing cannot be said for the Titans second best talent, their quarterback, Vince Young. Young, for reasons that are completely in his control, is one of the more intriguing athletes of this generation.

The best way to categorize this man's talent is jaw dropping. He is disturbingly athletic. He’s athletic to a point in which it appears that he is playing a football game against a defense made up of high school players. What people love and admire and respect, to a degree, about Vince Young is his near superhero way of playing football.

It's a superhero way not like a Superman, because Young doesn't dominate the quarterback position. He makes mistakes that he is forced to redeem. He is a superhero in the way that he seems like a normal human, a normal being, maybe one of us; a player that makes mistakes, and then...sudden flashes of brilliance that bring us out of the lull that football sometimes bring onto the viewer.

Young is also note-worthy because of his seemingly inability to grasp the NFL “code-book.” He seems mysteriously unconcerned with whatever the opposing defense is showing him.

He has always had a terrible throwing motion, in which he flings the ball by snapping his wrist in a way in which it looks like he has something very sticky on his hands in which he wants to get it off. But unlike quarterbacks with similar problems, Young has indifference in correcting it.

He still throws the same way as he did when he was winning games down in Austin, TX for Mack Brown at the rest of Longhorn nation. Some of his passes are thirty-five foot lasers, which scorch the air and land peacefully in receiver’s hands, and others are five-foot screens that crash and burn at the feet of the target.

No matter, Young must be thinking, the next one will be there, and if that one isn’t, then the next one will be.

There really isn't too much exciting news about Vince Young. He has been at the top of the football world since cruising to high school titles at Madison High School in Houston, Texas. In Houston he was considered a celebrity in that way that Lebron was once in Cleveland.

Then, of course, there are the college achievements: the 2004 Rose Bowl performance against the University of Michigan, and then, a year later, his famous eye-opening performance against USC in the 2005 National Championship.

That game was a work of athletic art, turning the USC defense into a national joke and making him the most popular football player in the country. He lost the Heisman Trophy that season to USC’s Reggie Bush in terms of the votes, but to everyone who saw that game that night, Young was the best player in college.

Then came the NFL, a career that has been up and down like off-racing Jeeps: picked 3^rd overall by the Tennessee Titans, on the cover of Madden a year later, leading the Titans to a 10-6 record and the playoffs, getting benched for a full year after a terrible season opener in 2008, and finally coming back in 2009 in week 9 (the Titans were 0-8 at that points, then won seven of their next nine).

In that time in Tennessee he has been booed at home, fought teammates, missed team flights, quarreled with his coaches. In the off-season he was involved in a fight at a strip club.

He might come off as a Chad Ochocino/Terrell Owens wannabe—a lot of talent, great speed and agility, but not a team player, not a true champion; but I would compare him more to a Manny Ramirez during his time in Boston, or Dennis Rodman in Chicago.

Rodman and Ramirez won titles wherever they were. They were tough players to handle. They were free spirits who used their fame and their athletic leverage to their advantage in ways that other players are too disciplined and respectful to do.

But these players won a lot of games (Ramirez was the best offensive player on two Red Sox title teams, and Rodman won five championships as a member of Detroit and Chicago). Young has the same blood: athletically advanced, brash and victim to his own misjudgments.

The strangest, and perhaps the most wonderful thing about Young is how mediocre most of his NFL game is. He might have the skill and the ferocity of the best, but he doesn’t have the patience and the willingness to improve.

As other passers come into this league, and pass him, they aren’t players with necessarily better skills or more advanced minds. They aren’t smarter. But they act smarter, they work harder, they take nothing for granted, they are players that care more about winning then they do acting like they care about winning.

For all of his heroics and successes and fame in college, all well deserved, it didn’t translate the way that it should’ve to the pro game.

At times he seems like a rowdy little kid who misbehaves for hours on end, driving his parents up the wall; and then at night, when his parents are ready to give up, the little kid cleans up his room without asking and makes a hot tea for the mother and he is forgiven for all the trouble.

Offensive series’ where nothing gets done, no room to throw, miscommunication with the receivers, the defensive unit taking down everything that Vince Young tries to do. Chris Johnson can do a lot, but he can’t do anything. And then, when you least expect it....BOOM! There is Young taking the ball in his hand and taking the game over.

Is Vince Young important in today’s NFL? The word, important, is the word there. This isn’t a question of whether he is a good player or a smart player, or a good winner, or a good businessman. I could care less about Young’s marketing ability, as he definitely has the capability to market himself as the pseudo-Peyton Manning: the big African-American playmaker.

But the real question is whether Young is important or not?

He is. If Vince Young has achieved anything in his sensational college career, in his abashed pro career highlighted by some athletic plays and a few good wins, he has completely and utterly defined what a 21^st century athlete is: undeniably talented, selfish, motivated only to an extent, brash, and a trouble-maker.

Vince Young isn’t an all-star like some people make him out to be, and he isn’t worthless carrion like others label him as....he’s directly in the middle.

If Ali defined the sixties and seventies with his political agenda, Montana, Bird and Magic defined the eighties with their winning ability, Jordan reflected the nineties with his flash, commercial success and hard-work, then Young defines the this decade with a pro career completely defined by his athletic ability.

Athletic ability comes before success in the win column. Case-in-point: Lebron James considered by most to be the best player in the world.

He was the most coveted free agent that this sports world has ever seen. Dwayne Wade has the title? Wouldn’t, just based on simple logic, Wade be the biggest free agent? Nope, that’s not how American sports work anymore.

The same reason why Vince Young has already been on the cover of Madden after only going 10-6, yet anyone could name 10 or 12 quarterbacks that have won more games, have done bigger things in the NFL then Young.

If one moment classifies Young’s career, one single moment, it would be shortly following the 2006 BCS National Championship game. Young entered the game as one of the greatest quarterbacks the University of Texas has ever had; he exited it as one of the greatest big-game players the college football universe has ever seen. Single-handily, it might be the greatest performance by a college athlete ever.

After Matt Leinart’s last swooping pass fell short and the confetti fell down on the blinding green field, the ABC cameras caught Young standing along, his face staring up at the sky. He had no smile on his face. He was stoic and proud like a knight returning from the Trojan wars. The rest of the team celebrated around him, smiling and cheering, but Young didn’t join in. He looked emotionally unattached.

The football world was his for the taking. He chose not to take it.