Quarterbacks Who Can Take The Hits

As career reversals go, NFL quarterbacks tend to have fewer than say, bond traders, but after a while even a great such as Donovan McNabb starts to get the look. It's the one that says he's learned how quickly you can go from beloved hero to lonely figure. It's the faintly chilled expression that says he only thought he knew what a cold institution the league is, and how expediently coaches and owners could act, but now he's really felt it. It's the look that all quarterbacks with long tenures acquire, of being slightly chipped around the edges.

This weekend's playoff games offer a better view than usual of the trials of NFL quarterbacks. If it's one of the more coveted positions on earth in terms of recompense and adulation, right up there with being the Prince of Wales, the shine of the job tends to obscure the fact that it can also be a cruel one. There are some hits no line can protect a quarterback from. For one thing, aging is accelerated -- what Bill Bradley once said, "An athlete has two deaths," is especially true of quarterbacks. There will hardly be a guy in action behind center this weekend who hasn't been benched, hurt, traded, rounded on by fans and written off by commentators as finished.

The Titans' Kerry Collins is a reformed drunk who once had his jaw broken by Bill Romanowski, and is playing for his fifth team. The Cardinals' Kurt Warner has broken bones in his right hand twice and lost three starting jobs since 2003. The Eagles' McNabb has a scarred right knee, and just six weeks ago he was benched and his career in Philadelphia was said to be over. Even the Steelers' Ben Roethlisberger, a man in his prime, is fighting back from three concussions, the last of which left him immobilized for 15 minutes and made his arms numb. These are the things young Joe Flacco in Baltimore has to look forward to if he intends to play in this league for a decade.

The presence of such knocked-around veterans in the postseason is an invitation to think for a moment about what makes great quarterbacks really great -- and it's not the slender youthfulness of their figures. It's the ability to keep working in the face of public failure, the mettle to ignore other people's opinions about them, and to cope with whiplash changes in their popularity and personal fortunes. The gray-chinned, stubbled faces of Collins and Warner show the toll on even the most decorated Super Bowl competitors: The winds of public opinion have shifted for and against them so violently that their faces seem permanently chapped.

The Giants' Eli Manning started his career as a No. 1 draft pick who displaced both the aging Collins and Warner, and then became the goat of Gotham City when he didn't win fast enough. By the middle of last season critics called him a hopeless washout -- just weeks before he won the Super Bowl.

"It's tough," the 28-year-old Manning said as he paused in a tunnel of Giants Stadium after practice on Wednesday, still looking like a kid in his sweat shirt and jeans, with his side-combed hair. "There is nothing you can do, and nothing you can say, except to go out there and play well."

McNabb, 32, has made the Pro Bowl five times in his 10 seasons in Philadelphia, but when he experienced a rough two-game stretch in November, with five interceptions and two fumbles, his future was suddenly in jeopardy. Coach Andy Reid benched him in favor of Kevin Kolb in the second half of a loss to Baltimore, and for a week afterward, McNabb heard speculation that he might not have a place with the team next season. In the space of a single bad month he had gone from a league fixture to a guy whose days were numbered. The Eagles have since responded with a 5-1 winning streak, but the incident clearly took a chunk out of McNabb.

Asked Wednesday if it was motivating for him, McNabb said shortly, "No, it really wasn't."

Reid has said that he benched McNabb so that he could step back from the game and get a fresh perspective. But McNabb, still obviously sensitive about it, doesn't accept the explanation. When you're a 32-year-old whose right anterior cruciate ligament was surgically repaired in 2006, a benching is not a corrective, but a painful glimpse of the inevitable end.

"I don't believe in stepping back and seeing. This isn't my first go-around," he said. "I have been playing the game for 10 years now. So I know what I can do; I know what I have done. I know how to change things if things are wrong. So I don't look at it in that way as far as stepping away and seeing things and going from there. I have been away from it, obviously due to injury. So I have had my share of stepping away and seeing it and getting back out there."

Across the league, other quarterbacks watched the McNabb drama with recognition and sympathy. McNabb's opponent the very next week after his benching was Warner, winner of a Super Bowl ring and a host of awards with the St. Louis Rams, yet whose career went into a swan dive after he broke a finger on his throwing hand. Between 2002 and 2007 he migrated from the Rams to the Giants to the Cardinals, and was benched by each. Now, at 37, and in his 11th season, he is a Pro Bowler again.

"It doesn't matter how long you've played this game or how well you played it, there's always periods where it doesn't go in your favor," Warner told writer Reuben Frank in November. "It doesn't mean you can't play anymore or you don't have a lot left in the tank."

"Everybody hits slumps," Warner added. "Look at my situation. You can't play this game trying to be perfect. You can't play this position living under expectations that you have to throw for 300 yards and three touchdowns every time out. Because that doesn't happen."

Whichever of these quarterbacks emerges from this weekend on top, all of them share the understanding that the triumph will almost surely be followed by a sickening downturn. The victories and losses and hot streaks and slumps are like the spinning of a dial, until it slows and stops. This was something even the great Johnny Unitas reluctantly learned. In 1972, the aging Unitas was benched by the Baltimore Colts in favor of the younger Marty Domres. He would eventually be sent to the Chargers and played one last season. After a game, a group of reporters stood around the 39-year-old Unitas's locker, and talked to him about his unfamiliar role as a fading backup. Could he be content mopping up after somebody else, they asked him? A grim look crossed Unitas's face.

"I'm no clock runner-outer," Unitas said.

But actually, he was. They all are.