DETROIT -- This time last year, Donovan McNabb was answering Super Bowl questions, such as how it felt to finally get over the conference championship game hurdle, how the Philadelphia Eagles planned to go about dethroning the defending-champion New England Patriots, and, of course, all things Terrell Owens.
What a difference a year makes, although some things haven't changed. McNabb is in town this week, and Wednesday afternoon rather candidly answered ESPN's questions about his team's tumultuous past 12 months, his status as the Eagles' leader, the rampant criticism he has endured throughout his career and especially this season, and, yes, all things T.O.
In a wide-ranging interview, the five-time Pro Bowl quarterback for the first time opened up about Owens' attacks on McNabb and the franchise; the stars' relationship and where it went wrong; how the McNabb-T.O soap opera affected the locker room; Owens' claim that the team would have been better off with Brett Favre; his image; and the infamous column by the leader of the Philadelphia chapter of the NAACP.
"It's been frustrating, it's been disturbing, but it's been a learning experience," McNabb said, summarizing 2005. "It's something that all of us, as men and as football players, not just on the Philadelphia Eagles but across the league, for everyone to understand what is going on and what has happened and be able to move things in a positive direction."
McNabb has his theory as to the motives that inspired Owens' behavior, which eventually led the Eagles to suspend/deactivate the All-Pro receiver for the final nine games of the season.
"It was money and power. Obviously, with the whole money situation I have no control over that. That's between that individual and the organization. And the whole power situation of being the face of the team or the recognizable guy -- if it's that he was trying to outdo me or outdo the organization, whatever -- that's what I felt led to what's been going on.
"I don't know what it was. You look back and how it all started and how it all ended, I've never said anything to bring anyone's name into anything, and when it came out that I got tired, you had opportunities to come out and say, 'I wasn't particularly talking about him.' Because when you bring that up, it leads to you're talking about Donovan. Then it goes to talking about me in another situation, calling me a hypocrite, it was just stuff leading into a direction that no one really had an answer for.
"It led to the team being separated. It led to a lot of things happening that was uncharacteristic of everybody. I tried to handle it in a fashion to where everyone understood that you can't let some things bother you. But when it bothers others, it can lead to what happened to us this year. Maybe people can learn from it and be able to eliminate that before it even happens."
Owens most famously took shots at McNabb during the offseason between the 2004 and 2005 seasons, and on into Philadelphia's 2005 training camp (though after declining his invitation to work out in Arizona, the two did not speak off the field until just before the start of the regular season). But the one remark that caught everyone's attention was in another Owens interview with ESPN.com during which he agreed with friend and ESPN analyst Michael Irvin's statement that the Eagles would be better off with Brett Favre at quarterback.
"I was about to go to bed when I heard it," McNabb recalled. "I caught the late show on ESPN. Me and my wife are laying there, interview comes on. It baffled me some of the things he said. I started laughing and my wife looked at me and she said, 'You find that funny?' That was just another step toward what's been going on, like, 'You gotta be kidding me.' I laughed and she took it to heart, really got pissed off about it, and I went to bed.
"I went to practice the next day, got there about 7:45, got me some treatment, being beat up a little this year, and five or six guys are in the training room looking up at it. [And they hear T.O. say,] 'I think that's a fair assessment, if we had Brett Favre we'd probably be undefeated.' I think some guys didn't hear it because the volume wasn't that high. A couple didn't see me come in and they asked, 'What did he just say?' I repeated it. 'If we had Brett Favre we'd be undefeated.' You could have dropped a pin. And I just walked right through the training room.
"What that showed to me, guys were in position like, 'Oh no. Here we go again.'"
McNabb may have laughed it off, but he acknowledges that Owens' statement that Favre would be better for the Eagles hit him hard.
"Some things you have to put under your belt a little bit. Some things you blow off your shoulder. That was a particular instance that I definitely blew off my shoulder. … Brett is someone I enjoy watching … but to say that when things aren't going well for us here in Philadelphia, to say that, I was like, 'Oh my god, are you kidding me?' So you're blowing it off your shoulder. You remember. Always remember. Just like the man says, you forgive but don't forget. I never forget. Everything that's happened, it may look like it doesn't bother me, but I always remember. I'll always remember what happened this season.
"In that situation, it was kinda like, 'That's unreal.' That's just like me saying, 'If we had Steve Largent, if we had Joe Jurevicius, we'd be undefeated. He'll now have to answer the question for the whole week about me saying it."
McNabb's selection of two white receivers was not by accident. He took Owens' choice of Favre as disrespectful to McNabb as an African-American quarterback.
"It was definitely a slap in the face to me. Because as deep as people won't go into it, it was [a] black-on-black crime. I mean, you have a guy that has been criticized just about all his career and now the last criticism is that I'm selling out because I don't run anymore, by an African-American [J. Whyatt Mondesire, the NAACP chapter president who ripped McNabb in a column that appeared in the Philadelphia Sun].
"And to say if we had Brett Favre, that could mean that if you had another quarterback of a different decent or ethnic background, we could be winning. That's something I thought about and said, 'Wow.' It's different to say if we had Michael Vick, Dante Culpepper, Steve McNair, Aaron Brooks, Byron Leftwich. But to go straight to Brett Favre, that slapped me in the face, like what I've done and what I set out to do…"
Did McNabb ever confront Owens about the Favre statement?
"No. Because the thing about it is, I like to talk as men. But that was never presented. Us being a block away, if you have a problem with me, come talk to me. You know where I live. You've been to my house. Come talk to me. I've never had a problem with Terrell. Never come out and said anything bad about Terrell or any of my teammates. But for me to see that, that shows that you have a problem with me. Is it jealousy? The commercials I'm in? Me being the franchise quarterback?
"I have no answers, but I could be real familiar with the situation if he talked to me. It shouldn't be that I have to wake up or before I go to bed look and see what he said next, or to hear maybe in the locker room what he may have said in the paper. Just pick up the phone and call me."
McNabb said Owens' attitude and approach spread throughout -- and ultimately divided -- the team. The result was a different group in terms of chemistry and camaraderie than the one that went to four consecutive NFC title games from 2001 to 2004. For example, McNabb's annual dinner party for the offense was scarcely attended compared to past years, with several starters skipping the event.
"What I've come to realize, what I've come to see, especially since I've been hurt," said McNabb, who spent the final seven games on injured reserve with a groin injury resulting from a sports hernia and underwent surgery soon after, "[is] seeing guys not trusting the guy next to them. If they're not talking about you publicly or what you're doing or not doing, then 'I'm in the clear.'
"Instead of saying, 'I need to pick my game up. I need to uplift my game to make this team better. I'm going to put it on my shoulders,' it was more, 'I'm going to wait and see what he does. He should be doing this. I'm out here doing this. If he steps his game up, we'll be fine.' It got to some points where people were talking about, 'If Donovan gets out of the pocket more and pick up the yards instead of trying to throw it here … he can't just sit back there.'
"This is the whole team [criticizing me]. It's easy to just pinpoint me and Terrell. That's the easy way out. But when you get deeper and see everything, it's not just me and T.O. It was a lot more that [grew] from the Terrell and Donovan situation."
The one-sided feud, McNabb revealed, actually had it roots in Week 12 of the 2004 season, at the end of an otherwise innocuous play against the Giants.
"Not a lot of people would know about this because [Owens] had a great season, everything went well, everybody's smiling and enjoying themselves," McNabb said, "but I believe it was the third play of the game. We had an 'all-go' call, [I] dropped back five steps, looked downfield, at that time I didn't feel he came open, and checked it down to [Brian] Westbrook. It was an incomplete pass."
Alas, it was the beginning of one of the strangest sports soap operas in recent memory.
"He came back, 'Hey, I was open, throw the ball!' Me being into the game, [I said] 'Hey, get in the huddle man.' In different words, obviously. He continued to talk about how he was open, throw the ball. And it [led] to me using some language that's really not suitable for the kids. But I'm into the game. I'm running the huddle. This is my show. I'm going to see you a lot of plays and some plays I won't see you. That led to us talking in the locker room. I don't argue. I feel as men we can talk. Voices are going to get raised. But we can talk as men and when the conversation is over we understand each other.
"I called him a couple of days later just to get back on the same page. I just elaborated to him, 'Hey, if we're going to continue to do this, we're not going anywhere. We have to be on the same page. I brought you here for a reason, for people to understand the chemistry that we have and the things we can do, which will lead us to winning a Super Bowl.'"
In retrospect, McNabb said about Philadelphia's 27-6 win over the Giants, "That's where I feel it all started. If he respected me after that or whatever. That's where maybe he felt like I was bigger than anything. But I'm a competitor. That's my huddle. I'm trying to lead us in the right direction."
Fast-forward to Super Bowl week. Owens has said that the Eagles' stance that they could beat the Patriots without him (he suffered a broken leg in Week 15 and missed the first two playoff wins) offended him.
"When questions keep being raised that we won't be the same offense without him, you want to continue to show confidence in the guys that are stepping in his spot, the guys that are out there. So you say, 'We can continue this thing. We can win without Terrell. We've been to three NFC Championship Games without Terrell.' So the message I'm sending to the guys is we can still do this thing. And the rest of the team said the same thing.
"So for whoever to feel that when he got hurt we didn't want him to come back, I went to his house when he got hurt. I drove over -- he's a block away from my house -- to see how he was doing. My dad and my mom called and they drove over to see him as well. [They] told him, 'If you need anything, you want a home-cooked meal, you want us to check on you' -- my mother's a registered nurse -- 'give us a call.' We opened up our arms.
"It wasn't like we all turned our backs. To hold that type of grudge and feel that way, again, out of left field."
Near the end of the Eagles' Super Bowl loss, the offense did not operate with the usual urgency of a team that is trailing, and not long after, in an interview with ESPN.com in which Owens spoke about his displeasure with his contract, Owens said, "I'm not the one who got tired in the Super Bowl," a clear jab at McNabb.
For the record, McNabb said he did not tire.
"I didn't get tired. I took a couple of hits. We were trying to get our personnel together. I don't think Andy [Reid] or any of us knew how many plays Terrell was going to be able to play, how he was going to be able to play on the ankle, would he have a setback. At that particular time, we're just trying to rotate guys. It looked like we were unorganized. When people say I got tired or we didn't get our two-minute drill together, that's completely false."
http://sports.espn.go.com/nfl/news/story?id=2315565
-Arlos
