I’ve always liked Donovan McNabb and I don’t like Terrell Owens (and I really hope that all the talk about TO coming to the Denver Broncos doesn’t end up with TO in Broncos’ blue and predominantly orange), but today the balance shifted a little. McNabb’s reach for the race card in his feud with TO was unconscionable.

It was like, it’s unreal,” McNabb said. “That’s like me going out and saying, `Hey, if we had Steve Largent. If we had Joe Jurevicius. It was definitely a slap in the face to me. It was a slap in the face because, as deep as people want to go into it, it was black-on-black crime.”
[...]
On Wednesday, McNabb brought up some of the criticism he had taken through his career, and said Owens was simply piling on with his statement.

“It’s different to say, `If we had Michael Vick or Daunte Culpepper or Steve McNair or Byron Leftwich,” McNabb said of four black starting quarterbacks. “But to go straight to Brett Favre, that kind of just slapped me in the face like, `Wow ...“‘

Yeah, wow. “Black-on-black crime.” Because God forbid that one black man criticizes another black man while saying something nice about a white man.

It happens that I questioned Owens’ statement, too, but not because of any obsession with skin color. I just wondered whether Favre was still at a place in his career where he could be that much of a difference maker. It never crossed my mind that this could be made into a racial issue--which just proves my lack of imagination in that arena, I suppose.

I would sincerely hope that decision-makers in the NFL don’t fill positions based on race. Winning championships isn’t compatible with monochromatic rosters.

McNabb’s statement just makes him look like an ass, which, when it’s entrenched in a story involving Terrell Owens, is quite a trick. How often does TO end up looking like the good guy in a news story?

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