Granted. But I don't think there are a lot of cosell-era casual bigots left in sports media. They are predominantly middle-aged, middle-class, white guys. Is it preposterous to suggest that they *might* be hesitant to label a black QB as overrated? I don't think anyone, Rush included, is saying he's overrated *because* he's black, just that he had a superstar season and became highly rated. On the other hand, when he disintegrates, nobody wants to be the first person to call foul. Can't say the same for Kurt Warner. Has anyone seen a mainstream labeling of Cordell Stewart as overrated? Shouldn't there have been? Allen Berra, a well known liberal sports commentator, says:Many quarterbacks are overrated. The difference is that when it's a black quarterback, people like Limbaugh assume that it must be because he's black. When a white quarterback is overrated, do people assume it's because he's white? Of course not. So why the racial connection when it happens to be a black person? Because some people are predisposed to make that connection; they see a black person and automatically make that connection because it comes so fucking naturally to a bigot.
So far, no black quarterback has been able to dominate a league in which the majority of the players are black. To pretend that many of us didn't want McNabb to be the best quarterback in the NFL because he's black is absurd. To say that we shouldn't root for a quarterback to win because he's black is every bit as nonsensical as to say that we shouldn't have rooted for Jackie Robinson to succeed because he was black.
Warren Moon was consistantly successful. Stewart is not. McNabb night not be, this season and next will tell. I think the difference is that Warren Moon was labasted as overrated <i>even as he was experiencing success.</i> The racism is obvious, and different from saying NcNabb seems to be sucking right now, and looking at past performance might not have been that great all around anyway, yet is still held in esteem, thus is overrated, so why?Warren Moon was mercilessly lambasted as the most overrated quarterback in football for years, by a lot of people who didn't seem to realize that the constant and widespread public denigration nullified their own argument: he was not overrated.
Jesus, I don't want to get stuck defending Limbaugh, so if it comes down to that, I'm not going to go any further. It was dissappointing that nobody in the ESPN booth, which includes Tom Jackson and Michael Irving, bothered to debate the issue though, and that nobody to this days seems interested in doing anything but dismissing it as racist.
