Something tells me this whole benching of Donovan McNabb situation hasn't fully played itself out yet. This certainly won't be the last we here of it. We already talked about some of the comments Mike Shanahan made about it during his post game press conference, but we didn't mention a quote that I found particularly interesting, via Mike Jones at TBD.
“You’ve got to be there,” Shanahan continued, elaborating on the message he hoped it sent to McNabb. “You’ve got to understand that you can’t think, you’ve got to react. The scenarios that we’re in, in those two minutes, you make a decision and you go with it. He understands that it’s got to be automatic and you’ve got to call two plays at a time. He understood why I did it, I think he did. I don’t think any quarterback likes it, but he understands.”
Since it's my job to find stories in things that may not appear to be all that newsworthy, I'm going to try and read between the lines of what Shanahan said here. He had previously said that Grossman had a better understanding of the hurry up offense then McNabb did and now he is saying that he needs a guy out there who would just react, instead of taking the time to think things through.
I guess he thinks that McNabb spent too much time hanging onto the ball in yesterday's game, and that taking a sack that late in the contest would destroy any chance they had of making a comeback. We saw McNabb take a very untimely sack on the fourth down play right before he came out of the game, and i don't think Shanahan was willing to allow that to happen on the next drive. Obviously it didn't turn out that way, but I'm assuming those were his intentions.
It's odd to criticize a player with as much experience as McNabb has for his approach to the game, but the whole situation was abnormal.
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