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Two things are clear from the ESPN interview of Donovan McNabb that’s Topic A in the sports world today:

1) Donovan McNabb needs to get himself away from the Eagles for his own sake.

2) The Eagles need to trade Donovan McNabb for their own sake.

One thing is clear from the history of how these things go:

1) McNabb and the Eagles are going to wait a year too long to separate themselves from each other.

Between the lines of the interview and even a little more obvious than that it’s clear that a sizable percentage of McNabb’s teammates dislike him and he feels the sting keenly. Merely getting rid of malcontent Terrell Owens is not going to repair the place.

Race is a huge factor here. It’s fascinating: you could maybe list 1,000 men in America whose life you would rather have than McNabb’s if you worked at it. He’s rich, famous, young, doing what he loves and powerful: McNabb told Eagle management to jump (get rid of Owens) and they got airborne.

And yet he clearly feels racial slights keenly, meant or not. Owens mutters that the Eagles would have been undefeated with Brett Favre - a stupid comment, given Favre’s year - and what McNabb hears is “some white guy.” And the subtext of McNabb’s own comments is the sense that his mostly African-American teammates just don’t like or respect him. Contrariwise, McNabb was able to turn his offense at Rush Limbaugh’s comments a few years ago to good use - he was slumping until Limbaugh opened his yap. (Limbaugh’s blather about the media had nothing to it - the great irony of McNabb and race is that he’s from the first generation of “normal black quarterbacks.”) Since then, and it pains the Redskin fan in me to say this, Donovan McNabb . . .

. . . has been one of the best quarterbacks in the NFL. This week the Redskins shot down the rumor that they’re in the market for Terrell Owens. I say, wrong Eagle. I’d trade McNabb for all three quarterbacks on Washington’s roster and management pariah Lavar Arrington too. Joe Gibbs has made a specialty of giving retread quarterbacks second acts to their American lives. He might be just the thing McNabb needs to achieve a career of genuine brilliance.

The biggest insult of all for McNabb was an idiot column by the suddenly-former head of the Philadelphia NAACP who criticized McNabb for acting white by becoming more of a pocket passer and less of a runner in the last few years. This was offensive because he was insisting that McNabb conform to the stereotype of the “great athlete” quarterback, the racial code phrase no one in sports needs help translating. And it was stupid because McNabb hasn’t run less because he’s getting “whiter”; he’s run less because he’s getting older. The man is pushing thirty and he understands that the running quarterback, as he ages, has two choices: stop being a running quarterback or stop being a quarterback period. If you keep that shit up, you will get injured to the point of uselessness. Cf. McNair, Steve.

The unwritten, stupid rule of sports punditry is that you don’t compare great athletes across color lines. Promising white basketball players have to be compared to Larry Bird or Steve Kerr. Promising black quarterbacks have to be compared to Randall Cunningham or Warren Moon. But the best analogs to Donovan McNabb are ofays: Mark Brunell, a pale male who used to be a running quarterback and curtailed his running as he approached McNabb’s current age; and Buffalo’s Jim Kelly, who year after year led teams almost to the top of the NFL class, but not quite.

I don’t know how or why Kelly was able to keep his teammates behind him through the years of frustration in Buffalo. I seem to recall there was at least one season when a star receiver threatened to go rogue on him and Kelly’s teammates helped Kelly bring the guy back into line, exactly what didn’t happen with the Eagles. Maybe McNabb should ask Kelly about it. Emerging from this interview and other things I’ve read is the suggestion that McNabb is a bit reserved. (”He acknowledges he could have done more” to smooth things over with Owens.)

I used to be the sort of white libertarian who, when someone like Donovan McNabb was so obviously aggrieved about racial issues, would wonder, “With a life like that why is he feeling sorry for himself?” But that was stupid. You have to stand in awe of the sheer troublesome power of it all, to make such a happy life unhappy.

...Mark Brunell, a pale male who used to be a running quarterback and curtailed his running as he approached McNabb’s current age...

Mark Brunell suffered several injuries to his knees, that more than anything else stopped his running, his age merely compounded the problem.

I heard a caller to sports radio say, "See, it's bad enough that the two couldn't get it together, but within our community it's worse to do that kind of thing to another brother..."

As if to say "black on black" crime is horrible, but if you commit a crime against a white person it's not so bad. Is this what McNabb meant?

When the Limbaugh debacle exploded McNabb's comment was "I consider myself to be a quarterback, I thought we were past all this."

Then when the Eagles made it to the NFC Championship against Michael Vick, he said what a great thing it was to have the top two QBs in the conference be black, and compared himself to Doug Williams going in to the Super Bowl.

Then TO called him out for not running and doing all he could to win, McNabb flip-flopped on the race issue again. Now he's done it again. McNabb's race is only an issue when he can use it to support his own agenda.