NFL QBs Sabotage Own Stats
12.02.07

NFL – This past Sunday marked the worst collective quarterback performance in NFL history, with the overall QB rating coming in at 12.6. One fan in Philadelphia called it Rex Grossman Day in honor of the field general of the Chicago Bears who last year, in two games, posted ratings of 1.3 and 0.0, which were so bad that they bordered on the impossible. This mass incompetence was the culmination of a week of all the league’s first-string QBs telling the media that they cared more about winning than their own individual statistics.

The man from Philly was happy to watch his beloved Eagles win a game against the hated Cowboys; on the other hand, he had to witness hometown QB, Donovan McNabb, throw 4 interceptions, 24 incompletions and two successful passes to Eagle cheerleaders. His rating was 4.3, only to be out-done by his Dallas counterpart, Tony Romo, who finished at 4.2, which included one perfect spiral to his head coach, Wade Phillips, who dropped the ball, and a glorious Hail Mary pass to Carrie Underwood, who has yet to give Romo a definitive answer as to whether she will haul the ball down for the retrospective game winner.

At the post-game press conference, McNabb reiterated what he and the rest of the NFL quarterbacks had turned into a mantra during the preceding week, that they didn’t care about their own numbers, just team W’s.

“Look at Ben Roethlisberger,” said McNabb, who was dressed as a can of Campbell’s Chunky Soup. “He had one of the worst Super Bowl performances of all time against Seattle. His QB rating was, what, twenty-two-point-six? He was so bad that coach Cowher had his wide receiver, Randle El, throwing the ball to Hines Ward for a TD. Sure the refs absolutely made sure that the Steelers won, no matter how many times the Seahawks Matt Hasselbeck completed a pass – the zebras just called it back, that’s all. And how do we remember those two guys, Roethlisberger and Hasselback? Roethlisberger is a winner and Hasselbeck is a loser. It’s all about the wins.”

McNabb and the other QBs had competed hard all week to establish which of them cared less about their completion percentage and touchdown-to-interception ratio and more about the team scoring more points than the other team. Derek Anderson of the Browns said he would rather complete all his passes to the beer vendor in Section 4 and win the game than have a QB rating of 150 and lose the game. Jay Cutler of the Broncos said, “Yeah, well I prefer to throw everything toward the opposite end zone if it means helping my team come out on top.”

Still all this talk about sacrificing personal numbers for the good of the team did not change the fundamental fact that half the teams in the NFL on Sunday ended up beating the other half of the teams; nor the fact that this has been the exact outcome of all the games ever played in the history of professional football.

“The only thing that changed this week,” said one disgusted Giants fan, who had watched his team lose while Eli Manning filed away a QB rating of 9.8, “was that my ten-year-old son was more enjoyable to watch quarterbacking his Pop Warner team than Eli was throwing passes dead center into the back of his offensive linemen.”

The irony was that the collective rating of 12.6 would have been a lot lower had not the man to whom this infamous day was named after, Rex Grossman, recorded a 98.7. To add another layer of irony, his team, the Bears lost the game to the Packers and Brett Favre, who wound up with a rating of 6.8 and managed to throw one interception to the Lions, who were playing three hundred miles away in Detroit.

Afterward, Grossman was contrite, saying he had been selfish in trying to play his position well by completing more passes than not instead of helping his team win by playing like Bad Rex, the same guy who had led the Bears to the Super Bowl last year, only to lose to Peyton Manning and the Colts because he did not throw enough interceptions.

“I gotta get untracked again,” said Rex.

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