Flak Magazine: Kick Out the Sports! 02.09.04

The big question that swirled around the NFL's Pro Bowl on Sunday — other than why bother gathering the league's stars for a half-assed game in which the object appears to be not getting injured — was "Why wasn't two-time Super Bowl MVP Tom Brady picked to play?"

To be Socratic about it, let's answer that question with a question. When the top CEOs join the gathering for the World Economic Forum, do they invite the manager of your local Wal-Mart?

That's what Brady is as an NFL quarterback: a good manager. That's not me saying it. That's his teammates, coaches and recent Super Bowl opponents, the Carolina Panthers. The Patriots have won two Super Bowls in the past three years, and Brady has gotten the MVP award for each of those, essentially, for not screwing up.

"I knew it was going to be an uphill battle because Tom Brady is such a good game manager," Carolina receiver Ricky Proehl told reporters after the Super Bowl, referring to how Brady lucked out by starting New England's game-winning drive from its own 40-yard line because the Panthers' John Kasay had shanked the kickoff out of bounds.

This is not Brady's fault. He's only the culmination of what's been happening in the NFL for years. Once, swashbucklers like Bobby Layne, Johnny Unitas, Joe Namath, Terry Bradshaw and Ken Stabler were lauded for bringing excitement and danger onto the field, calling their own plays and, if they made mistakes along the way, more than making up with edge-of-your-seat heroics. But while fans may want excitement, coaches want predictability, and over the years they took away responsibility for calling plays, then stuck in short-passing offenses in which gaining five yards at a time was deemed better than going for broke.

A few quarterbacks have overcome these handcuffs. Peyton Manning generally gets the final word on play-calling, which is why he does all that chicken-dancing at the line of scrimmage. Steve McNair and Donovan McNabb can leave you breathless with their ability to salvage a broken-down play. And, of course, there's the new fan god, Michael Vick. All of these quarterbacks were in Hawaii Sunday except for Vick, who would have been had he not missed most of the 2003 season with a leg injury.

But most quarterbacks are molded into game managers, and why not? It seems to work. Here are the Super Bowl winning quarterbacks in the new millennium — Trent Dilfer, Brad Johnson and Tom Brady (twice). All game managers, all types who are assigned to read "Who Moved My Cheese" along with the playbook. No doubt, coaches like game managers because merely not screwing up can bring a team wild success, but unless you're a fan of a particular manager's team, who cares?

Sure, Brady led last-minute, game-winning drives in each of those Super Bowls, but no one is going to confuse him with John Elway, a master at pulling a win out of butt in the last second. You never get the sense that Brady is willing his team down the field. Even Joe Montana, the pre-eminent game manager, had moments where he appeared to work magic down the field.

Let's put it this way: if you're not a Patriots or Panthers fan, which quarterback had the most exciting moments in the Super Bowl? The Patriots' Brady or Carolina's Jake Delhomme, who willed his team back from an early deficit and a risk of a blowout by chucking two long touchdown passes while darting away from New England rushers? New England controlled the ball twice as long as Carolina, yet Delhomme, not named the MVP, had the Panthers 1:08 away from taking the game to overtime. Delhomme probably wouldn't make dating Tara Reid look boring either, as Brady did.

Brady, to be fair, is good at what he does. And this whole emphasis on game management isn't all football's problem. Hockey is practically being clutched and grabbed to death by stifling trap defenses, courtesy of the New Jersey Devils, who rode a strategy of going up 1-0 early and sitting on the puck the rest of the way to three Stanley Cup titles since 1995. The NBA was desperate to showcase Michael Jordan even as he approached 40 because most teams now emphasize slowdown, game-management styles in which the object is to see who can miss the fewest shots, not who can hit the most.

Perhaps the sporting world, as they say, merely reflects life. In the United States, we have bigger and bigger companies playing it safer and safer as they try to protect their profits and image as they surely and ruthlessly expand their presence. In that sense, Tom Brady is the manager of the New England Wal-Mart, taking orders from corporate to monotonously drive his store to dominance. It may be successful, but it isn't exciting to watch.

E-mail Bob Cook at bobc@flakmag.com.