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We're not saying that Josh McDaniels was sitting there one day, relaxing in his armchair, when he saw the Cash4Gold commercial come on and began eyeing that Super Bowl ring he was wearing. He probably didn't think to himself, "I wonder what I could get for it, all melted down?" We're not claiming he is really that short-sighted, but… Do you know how hard it is to find a truly good, young, long-term solution at quarterback in the NFL? Do you? McDaniels couldn't possibly, or he and Pat Bowlen could never let it get to this point.I don't mean the kind of quarterback where you bask in the surprise and say, "Well I didn't expect that out of him!" We're not talking one good year. I don't mean temporary genius like Arrested Development. I mean long-term dependability like The Simpsons, something that if not spectacular is at least there. Slotted. Solid. Not like a Chad Pennington in Miami or Scott Mitchell in Detroit or Don Majkowski in Green Bay or Erik Kramer in Chicago or—you say it, Josh—Matt Cassel in New England. I'm talking about the real thing. I mean a good, long-term quarterback that you can set behind center in his early-twenties and just hand the keys to for the next ten years. Do you know how hard this is? Apparently not, Denver. Apparently you have no idea, or you couldn't possibly have let this happen. Not yet. You couldn't have let us put odds on where a guy like this lands. Not when you have a guy who is already a Pro Bowl quarterback for a franchise in transition, who is just now picking up the nuances of the NFL game and finally ditching the days of being a thick-skinned punching bag in the backfield at Vanderbilt. And yet they're here. Denver managed to do the one thing you can't in the NFL, which is assuming you can for a moment take lightly the idea that a competent quarterback is a cinch to replace. Look around. More than half the teams in this league aren't close to totally satisfied with that position. It's just too damn hard to play, too unpredictable to project, too unstable to buy stock in. Name a franchise—even some in decent situations now—and you have a team that has, at least for the better part of a decade, played roulette with that position. Try Cleveland, Baltimore, Miami, the Jets, Tampa Bay, San Francisco, Arizona, Detroit, Chicago, Minnesota, Tennessee, Jacksonville, Houston, Kansas City, Washington. Even Dallas fits the bill. It was just a few years ago that the Quincy Carter, Ryan Leaf, name-your-bust saga was unfolding down there. It happens everywhere. All the time. You should avoid it like the plague. It kills more coaches than old age. We're not saying Jay Cutler isn't thin-skinned. We're not saying anything of the sort. But when you take the young, big-armed quarterback of the second best offense in football and in a single off-season do this? Lie to me once, shame on me, lie to me twice, ship me to friggin' Detroit? How does this happen? We don't know, but you deserve some peculiar kind of reward for this type of long-term thinking. Maybe a spokesman deal with Cash4Gold. Elsewhere… Not surprisingly, the Ohio man who made a motorized bar stool drives drunk on it, crashes, and is charged with a DUI. Here's the video of that naked French pole vaulter we talked about yesterday. (It's actually a beautiful little French short. The video, that is.) Kissinger wants to bring the World Cup to the U.S. What'll protect a ref from fans? Oh yeah, a gun.
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