Sunday, October 24, 2004

Open mouth, insert foot.

There's a good reason why this year, the Jacksonville Jaguars are being referred as the "Cardiac Cats" by their fans. In fact, there are five of them.

Seven games into the 16-game season, the Jags have a 5 and 2 record, and each one of those five wins has been cinched in the fourth quarter: one with less than three minutes left on the clock and four in the last minute of the game.

By comparison to the first game when the win came with a touchdown as the clock hit 0.00, today's seemed like a real snoozer. Josh Scobee, the rookie kicker, put the ball through the uprights from 53 yards with a whole 38 seconds left in the game, for a 27 - 24 win.

Byron Leftwich, the quarterback, isn't much more than a rookie himself. This is only his second season, and he wasn't even the starter during the first part of last year's.

He's, what? Maybe 24 but he already has the unflapable maturity of a veteran QB years older in age, and an arm, oh what an arm. An accurate arm that can pull off a 60-yard pass or drill a short one right between the numbers of one of his receivers. Which one? It doesn't matter. Whoever is open, and that guy had better be ready to catch a bullet.

Leftwich is working the plays called in from the sidelines, or calls an audible at the line of scrimmage if it's obvious it's not going to work when the other team lines up, and uses his smarts when the plays don't work as called.

And Leftwich keeps getting up off the grass for the next play. Same thing last week when he took a helluva hit that the announcers thought would take him out of the game because of the way he'd landed on his shoulder. A few plays later they said he's gotta be out now because of the hit he'd taken and the way his ("Ooh, he's limping! Bad! Let's show that replay again!) ankle had bent.

So this game's over and all game long SeeBS's commentators have been extolling Leftwich's wonderful and amazing virtues and what an incredible career this young quarterback has ahead of him, and they can't say enough great things about him.

And when the game was over, one of them said: "Leftwich may be one of the best black quarterbacks I've ever seen."

Well, dang SeeBS. Does that mean you evaluate Leftwich and all black quarterbacks by a different standard than you do white ones? That old separate but supposedly equal thing?

Or did you mean that the qualities and abilities Leftwich brings to his position seem incredible to you, considering that he's (ya know . . . nudge-nudge, wink-wink) black.

Gag me.

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1 Comments:

Blogger Jenna said...

[O]ne of them said: "Leftwich may be one of the best black quarterbacks I've ever seen."So he ranks right up there with Steve McNair, Michael Vick, Daunte Culpepper, and Donovan McNabb, but not, say, Drew Bledsoe or Peyton Manning.

"Gag me" is right.

10:47 AM  

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