It sounds like a trade straight from a NFL Madden video game. Six-time pro bowl quarterback Donovan McNabb for… basically nothing at all.
Gamers make these kind of trades all the time. They pick their favorite team, trade for all the highest-rated players and then dominate their virtual football seasons – it’s kind of like unlocking the invincibility cheat code on GoldenEye 007. But the funny thing about this McNabb trade is it actually happened in real life.
On April 4, the Philadelphia Eagles traded McNabb, 33, to their division rival Washington Redskins for two draft picks, neither of which are first rounder’s in the upcoming draft.
The whole trade seems utterly ridiculous to me.
Over the last ten years, McNabb has been one of the best players in the NFL leading the Eagles to five NFC Championship games and an appearance in Super Bowl XXXIX, while passing for 32,873 yards and 216 touchdowns.
Philadelphia’s reasons for trading the quarterback remain unclear. Maybe the Eagles thought McNabb was too old – 33 for an NFL quarterback is like 62 for a Wal-Mart employee – or maybe the Eagles just didn’t want to pay McNabb more than $11 million that he was scheduled to make in 2010 between bonus and base salary. Whatever the reason Philly made the trade, they’re going to miss him and not just for what he could do on the field.
McNabb’s one of the classiest athletes in all of sports, and probably one of the only ones that I would approve of my kids looking up to as a role model, if I had any. After radio host Rush Limbaugh made an insensitive racial comment toward McNabb, an African-American, the quarterback turned the other cheek with such grace that he would have made Ghandi proud. And when former teammate Terrell Owens called him out in the media, McNabb remained professional by refusing to stoop to the wide receiver’s childish level of ad hominem name-calling.
Between what he can do on and off the field, McNabb may be one of the top-10 players and top-three people in the NFL, but Philadelphia didn’t see it that way.
They say one man’s trash is another man’s treasure, and I’m sure that will be the case with McNabb in Washington. Hopefully he can prove that to everyone this year by winning a Super Bowl in Washington, because the Redskins definitely have the talent now with No. 5 on their team.