Let me paint a picture for you....
In a field of golden wheat, only a scant week or so from harvest time, a lazy wind wanders over the wheat stalks rolling like amber waves of...something. I'm not sure what. I think I've heard something like that somewhere before.
Anyway, in that field of rolling grain stands a man. Not an old man with too many years of riding the combine, nor a young man with stars in his eyes thinking about how some day he
's going to shake the dirt of this town off his feet and see the world!Nope, this guy standing in the Kansas wheat field, twirling a football in one hand as he looks off to the west, is roughly thirty years old. He's still got a few years left to realize his dream of becoming a Superbowl winning quarterback. But truthfully, he knows that his time is running out.
He's thrown a million footballs through hanging tires in his lifetime...
But right now, he just needs a job.
This journeyman didn't even start out with dreams of playing the NFL cathedrals on Sunday afternoons. He grew up as a basketball star, playing for his dad the coach. But he did play high school football. And he used that to play a little at the local junior college and he played well enough there that he got a full ride scholarship to an ACC school (Maryland).
He went undrafted though. He hadn't put up particularly brilliant numbers, but a guy who worked for the Minnesota Vikings (Scot Linehan) thought maybe he'd just give the guy a try out...let him throw the ball around the Metrodome for fun for a few days...send him home with a smile, some great stories, and maybe, if he's lucky, a signed jersey.
But that coach saw a little something in the Kansas basketball player and the Maryland QB managed to stick it out for a few years on the bottom of the Vikings roster.
But then there was a coaching change in Minnesota and the kid didn't have any kind of connections with the new staff...he was out on the road again.
This time he ended up in San Francisco with the hope of backing up a #1 overall pick in Alex Smith. A funny thing happened however, Smith never really played that well and the Kansas Kid had to step in and do mop up duties. He even managed to start a few games over the highly touted franchise quarterback.
A quarterback controversy bubbled up in the first year and then raged for another two years before the organization decided they were going to stop wasting the bajillions of dollars they'd given to Alex Smith and handed the starting job over to "star quarterback."
The Kansas Kid was out on the street again, but now he's thirty years old and the life of NFL quarterbacks after thirty is typically very, very short --unless you're the devil who wears the number 4.
But that old coach, the one who saw something in the Kansas Kid those so many years ago had gotten a new gig with this lowlife organization that hadn't won in 50 years....Linehan talked the Lions into trading a sixth round pick for the guy the forty-niners were going to toss on the trash heap.
And so, the Kansas Kid is once again backing up a #1 overall pick, but this time he's wiser. He's seen the writing on the wall and he's come to terms with it. He realizes now that even if he never is the MVP of the SuperBowl...backup NFL QB is a damn good paying job and he's more than happy to have it.
So he took up his clipboard and put those million passes through the hanging tire in the back of his mind.
But last week, The Franchize was disassembled by a fire breathing defensive end named Julius Peppers. That #1 overall pick may be a few weeks away from taking another snap. So the Kansas Kid puts down the clipboard, strings up the shoulder pads and picks up the old scratched and dented helmet.
It's time to play again for the Kansas Kid...
Meanwhile...
The Philadelphia Eagles team plane taxis the runway as the malevolent and dark one, Vick, leans back in his first class seat. Banished once already from the NFL for killing defenseless dogs in a sick and twisted form of sadist sport, Micheal Vick is getting a second chance at life.
He was supposed to be backing up the new "future of Philadelphia" in Kevin Kolb, but the new guy was pounded relentlessly against Green Bay the week before. So Vick gets a chance to take the reigns...Sporting a darkened visor, black and foul as his soul, Vick will come into Ford Field and do battle against the dregs of the NFL, the Lions.
He claims to seek redemption. He claims that he has paid for his foulest sins, but there is no bleach strong enough to white wash the depths of evil from the man's soul.
Good vs Evil
I could break this game down by positions and talent levels, schemes versus schemes...but this battle, this legendary contest, is not about 34 defenses or 43 defenses, spread offenses or two tight end sets...this is return of the Kansas Kid, just looking for another chance at glory, against the Dark Lord of Evil...
Go Lions!!!! They're probably going to get killed...
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