How pathetically thin-skinned today's society is! Howard Cosell made an entire career saying controversial stuff; in today's market he would have been shown the door after three "Monday Night Football" broadcasts.

Spoons would disagree with you on the second point (see comments in this post).

He is surely right that the NFL and the media are looking for more black coaches, though I don't know about quarterbacks. McNabb is overrated, but I attribute it to East coast bias.

A couple of thoughts:

1 - It was the type of comment you hear a lot on Limbaugh's show... not a racist comment in any way, but treading on territory where those who don't parse it carefully will hear what they want to hear.

2 - People (conservatives and liberals alike)don't want to think about this stuff on a football show.

3 - Everybody's rationalizing it by saying he was wrong on the facts... as if this were unusual among sports commentators.

McNabb is defnitely over-rated, but not because of his race. The reason is the media's obsession with quarterbacks who can run. While having a pair of legs is obviously an asset, McNabb makes terrible decisions and sees the field poorly. He doesn't have a bad arm, but neither is he pin point accurate. As Limbaugh points out, the eagles defense carried the team last year, but the media attributed much of their success to McNabb and his running abilities.

Dan: Glad to hear you're a Giants fan. I like yoiur site even more now.

While there is no doubt some fraction of sportwriters out there who may champion McNabb more for his race than any other factor, the hype over him is more based on two factors:

-- McNabb was that rarity in college, a star quarterback from a northeastern university, Syracuse, in this case, which also has a major journalism school that turn out reporters into both the print and broadcast media. McNabb put up 66 points on the University of Miami as a senior, which guarenteed he would receive a lot of favorable press coming out of college;

-- Once in the NFL, McNabb was drafted by the Eagles, who are members of the NFC East, which is by far the most high-profile of all the divisions in the NFL, featuring the main team in New York, Daniel's Giants (mine too), the team that generates the most merchandising sales, the Dallas Cowboys, and the team in the nation's capital, the Washington Redskins.

Any quarterback coming into that division and playing for a team that wins back-to-back titles is going to get hyped due to the media concentration, no matter what color he is. IMHO, Kerry Collins is now over-hyped, too, at least compaired to a Kerry Collins putting up the same numbers for either of his former teams. It's the location, more than any liberal racial attitude, that caused McNabb to be overrated in the media.

Rush was more susceptible to say something insensitive because of his addiction to painkillers, don't you think?

Yes and Clinton was always talking about "the children" because he had a love child himself... by the way did you hear the space alien just endorsed Wesley Clark? Read it all in my tabloids...

Scooped me again on the space alien, HH, I'll get even.

Because you have the incredibly good taste to be a Giants fan, I'll accept your premise about McNabb's value last year (worse than Collins, better than Favre, Bledsoe, et al). But I'll note that this doesn't seem to support your contention that the media focused on McNabb not becuase he was black, but, rather, because he was "good" and was a "star" QB on a winning team. Shouldn't the same have applied to Collins, who, according to your stat site, had a BETTER year than McNabb and also was a "star" on a winning team.

I think the correct answer to Rush is that the media pick up certain players as "stars" for various reasons - reasons which may include race but which are more likely to be that the player is quotable, good looking, etc. Why do you think Sehorn or Shockey have been made into "stars" (maybe a little bit because of race - Sehorn is a white cornerback, for example - but more importantly because of who Sehorn married and what Shockey says).

One other point. Rush's statement seems to me to be the EXACT same point that Isaiah Thomas made about Larry Bird 15 years ago ("If Bird was black, he'd be just another good guy"). In both cases, what is being said is that the media is overrating the player's talent because of his race. I don't remember any Presidential candidates calling for Thomas to be fired.

I think one of the reasons (besides the ones mentioned above) that McNabb gets more attention than he deserves is that he's a running quarterback. A 15 yard run to get a first down on third-and-long is more likely to be shown on Sportscenter than a 15 yard pass. I remember a few years ago, when Drew Bledsoe was still with the Patriots, many of the fans in Boston said they would rather have Mark Brunell or Kordell Stewart because they can run and make plays.

As for Rush's comments, I think it shows more that he doesn't know football than anything else. To some extent, his comments used to be true, 10-15 years ago. When Doug Williams, Warren Moon, and Randall Cunningham were the only black QBs around, there probably were a lot of people who wanted them to do well bacause they were black. (If you don't agree with this statement, do you think many people wanted Jackie Robinson to do well because he was black when he first played with the Dodgers?) It's not unreasonable to assume that some of these people were sportswriters, though most of them probably didn't let that affect the quality of their work. Now that there are many black QBs in the league, it's not an issue anymore. But it still is for black coaches. Can anyone honestly say that the people who approve of the NFL's rule on interviewing minorities don't care one way or the other how Marvin Lewis, Herm Edwards, and Tony Dungee do?

And Dan, you better be right about the Red Sox's ability to come back from bad losses, or there's going to be a lot of pissed-off people here in Massachusetts.

Does anyone know if Rush Limbaugh had signed on to be a Campbell's Soup spokesman of late?

(Any true football fan will understand what I'm getting at. So would ... um, Donovan McNabb. And Kurt Warner.)

Interesting comparison in Slate by someone who I'm sure doesn't agree with Rush politically. http://www.slate.com/id/2089193/
I think it's interesting that you mention "sabremetrics" because from what I've read part of what it's about is looking at the true value of a player and not just being enamored with their physcial abilites. I mean the best description of Jeff George I ever heard was that of a "coach killer". The other applicable quote: "million dollar arm, 10 cent head."