Donovan McNabb's Wristband Rumor: Some Thoughts

First, I understand this rumor to be true. To recap, the gist of the rumor is this: Donovan McNabb refused to wear a wristband after Mike Shanahan requested it during the 2010 season. The request was apparently made to help McNabb remember the plays better, and Donovan refused because he felt that wearing the wristband would ruin his image as a player. 

Despite some responses from a few local beat reporters to discredit this information, it's blatantly obvious that the team would never go on record in admitting anything. They want to trade McNabb and get no value by sullying his reputation further.

As stated in my last article, the Junkies have been spot-on in the past when breaking news like this. Furthermore, these rumors were corroborated by former players in the Philadelphia area. In essence, McNabb has had an issue with wearing wristbands and remembering plays throughout his career.

Unfortunately, McNabb fanboys gain little from these rumors even if they are seen as true. Some people think McNabb is too great a talent for this issue to be considered a big deal.

With or without the wristband, he still gives you a better chance to win football games, right? And the best coaches cater their gameplans to the talent they have, not the other way around. Yes?

So in the end, this all gets dumped back on the head coach. Check. Your move.

Not so fast.

In response to the first question, a lot of fans love to justify a player's abilities based on their past career performance. That premise only works when a player is still in their peak playing years. For instance, I think Kobe Bryant is a future NBA Hall-of-Famer, but in that last series the Lakers lost to a better Dallas team and the best player in that series was Dirk Nowitzki. No question.

Similarly, McNabb is well past his peak years. He's by no means done in this league, but his best years are behind him and I think most level-headed NFL fans can agree on that.

John Beck is an unknown commodity. It's easy to blast him because the small amount of time he has gotten was sub-par.

But you know what he will do? Listen to a coach that wants him to wear a wristband. Silly, right? Maybe. Maybe this rumor, however, is just a flash of what people really don't know about McNabb as a quarterback. Maybe when McNabb was doing his own thing instead of following the plays, it used to work out in the past because he had the mobility to extend plays with his feet.

Not so much a factor these days, though.

Still, if the Shanahans had simply tailored their game planning to McNabb more, this would all have been a non-issue, right?

Well, who's to say they didn't? Who's to say they didn't water the plays down so McNabb could run them better and then they still had this issue later in the season?

As fans, we often don't take the time to think rationally about players and coaches because we live in an age of immediate gratification. I'm not sure that coaches will avoid modifying plays based on personnel if they know that doing so gives them the best chance of winning. I mean, their jobs are on the line here. I know I'd do whatever I could to gain an edge on every play.

And please don't say that putting in a lazy, fat turd like Haynesworth into the active roster would have helped them win. He didn't try. He didn't care. He still doesn't care.

Fine, fine, fine. They still made the mistake of trading to get McNabb in the first place. Why didn't they do their due diligence so that they could know all this BEFORE making such a disastrous mistake? You got me there.

Here's the thing: I know Shanahan's nature. He's obsessed with winning.

In 2009, the year he was out of work after being fired, he watched film for hours on players, teams, anything to help him learn and get better. The man is so meticulous that he even set up cameras at the practice field to watch his players more closely. Missing a detail like this doesn't seem like him at all.

Snyder, on the other hand, can't seem to make a decision without having it blow up in his face. It's quite possible that this is how things went down: Shanahan got hired and the first major decision, the McNabb idea, is thrown at him by Snyder, who, by the way, has done this with almost every head coach he's had, including Gibbs.

Shanahan may have been pushed into an awkward position of rushing his approval on a decision he wasn't fully behind in the first place. Yeah, it's not like Shanahan, but it is like Snyder, and the latter person is the only common denominator in all the dysfunction and toxicity that's been rampant in this organization for the last decade or so.