It’s been 16 years – time for a Super Bowl post. I don’t
watch much football in recent years, but I generally succumb to the NFL
conference championships and the Super Bowl.
I also make exceptions for getting together with my father
to watch the West Virginia Mountaineers, despite the travesty of WVU joining
the Big 12 Conference, which turned out to be one of the early signposts along college
sports’ highway to hell.
In 2019 I watched Jalen Hurts, as quarterback at Oklahoma,
comprehensively take apart the West Virginia defense. He did it with his legs
and he did it with his arm. I gather a big goal of Hurts’s 5th year season
at Oklahoma was to demonstrate that he had the arm to be an NFL quarterback. Goal
accomplished. The memory of Hurts’s dominance in that game stayed with me, and
I’ve halfway kept an eye on him since.
Pro football is different than college football, and it
doesn’t shock me when a great college football player turns out not to be the
right fit for the NFL. But I really enjoy watching a quarterback use his legs. I
hate the notion that every team needs a big strong pocket passer – a view that
is less universal, but far from dead; a Carson Wentz still gets more love from
Mel Kiper and more chances to win a starting job than a Jalen Hurts. Also, it
raises my hackles every time a young black QB comes along and has a ton of
nay-sayers, including ones who urge a position change, usually to receiver or
safety. Hey, the 1960s called and wants its take back.
These things bias me in favor of Lamar Jackson and Jalen
Hurts (and now “too skinny” Jayden Daniels. The pundits seemed to be trying to
exile him to Canada). I hope each of them gets to lift the Lombardi Trophy
before they are done. People sneer a bit at Hurts because he doesn’t throw the artistic deep ball that some
other QBs throw. He’s a football player, he wins with his legs and his
toughness and his improvisational gifts. He may have trouble making All-Pro
rosters or winning MVPs because his individual stats may not dazzle. A QB like
that can steal a Super Bowl now and then.
The better NFL teams and, more definitely, the great QBs of
my childhood, Stabler and Staubach and Griese and Bradshaw, had distinguishable
personalities. The younger crop coming along now have a more pleasing variety
than the Tom Brady generation. I am ready to move on from the Mannings, from
Roethlisberger, from Brady, from Aaron Rodgers.
So I can’t lose in tonight’s matchup, because Patrick
Mahomes is unique and wonderful in his own right. I’ve admired Mahomes, still
just age 29, for many of the same reasons I admire Hurts. He was somewhat
unsung coming out of college, and he was never a mechanically perfect automaton
in the pocket. I love his improvisations, with his legs and with unorthodox
throws, backhanded and left-handed and falling down and what have you. I also
admire Andy Reid, who’s claimed his due respect later in his career. For the
longest time he was viewed as a second-tier head coach, fatally flawed in his game
management skills – good enough to get you to the playoffs, maybe even to the
Super Bowl, but never good enough to win it.
But I think I’d like to see Hurts take the trophy from
Mahomes, and for Nick Sirianni to answer his detractors the way Andy Reid has.
