NFL

More Than Just a Quarterback: What Steve McNair Meant to the Titans

By Hank Koebler
NFL / NCAA Football Writer
July 4th, 2011

I lived an hour outside of Nashville for quite a while and grew up rooting for the Titans. While normally I remain objective and stay away from covering the Titans unless the story is of national significance, I chose to abandon that practice and give a Titans fan’s perspective on this two-year anniversary of the tragic death of Steve McNair.

On what I expected to be a typical Independence Day, I was on ESPN.com looking at the latest news, and closed out the browser window when I finished skimming the headlines. Before I had even gotten out of the computer chair, my father immediately asked what date the NFL preseason started, and I reopened Firefox so I could look it up. A headline on ESPN that hadn’t been there a few moments ago when I was last on the site instantly grasped my attention.

Steve McNair was dead.

I read the article and still couldn’t believe it. I told my family, and we turned on the TV and watched the coverage. As the talking heads repeated police statements, aired McNair highlights and debated whether McNair should be enshrined in Canton, I still couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

To be honest, I wasn’t even a huge McNair fan when he played for the Titans. He was great, but at that time I was more of a fan of the team than I was of any particular player on the team. When he died, though, I was absolutely shocked. The face that I had always associated with the team I grew up rooting for was gone, covered in blood spilled by a jealous lover.

My first football-related memory was the “One Yard Short” play in Super Bowl XXXIV, when Kevin Dyson caught a pass from McNair and was tackled one yard short of tying the heavily-favored St. Louis Rams as the game clock ran out. I don’t even remember watching the play – after all, I was only six when it happened – but I do remember the reaction and excitement of everybody watching the game. Having lived in Tennessee for almost half my life, in my mind McNair and football went hand in hand.

Ever since then, McNair has always defined Tennessee Titan football. His leadership and toughness forged the team’s identity in the crucial years after they moved from Houston, and Titans fans quickly learned to love the attitude of resilience and perseverance McNair embodied. Even after the Titans traded him to the Ravens, McNair’s imprint on the team was still highly visible as the Titans drafted University of Texas quarterback Vince Young with the third pick of the 2006 draft, the same pick with which the Titans drafted McNair in 1995.

With every spin, stiff-arm and improbable escape from a near sack, the extremely raw Young provided glimmers of hope for a return to the excitement that the Titans had lacked in the final two years of McNair’s tenure with the team. On the flip side, with every temper tantrum or boneheaded play that resulted from not studying the playbook enough, Young provided plenty of reason for fans to wonder if he’d ever fill McNair’s shoes. On the afternoon of October 31, 2010, fans no longer had to wonder, as Young showed he would never come close to matching McNair’s legacy.

On a scramble in the fourth quarter against the San Diego Chargers, Young injured his left ankle. Young left the game but trainers did not deem his injury severe enough to take him to the locker room or to even take his shoe off. Instead, he sat on the bench with ice on his ankle. The Titans were down 33-25 and facing fourth-and-2 on the Chargers’ 15-yard line with 37 seconds left in the game, and Young stood on the sideline watching as Kerry Collins’ pass to Chris Johnson fell incomplete.

At that moment, I gave up on Young ever being the Titans’ quarterback. After attending one of McNair’s football camps, Young had grown extremely close to McNair, referring to him as “Pops” and patterning his style of play into a nearly exact copy of McNair’s. Throughout his career, Young had made a point of comparing himself to McNair as often as possible. At that moment though, Young showed that he lacked the toughness to ever fill McNair’s shadow.

A friend I was watching the game with didn’t understand why I was so frustrated, and told me something to the effect of “Calm down, he got hurt. What was he supposed to do differently?”

For a fan of 31 other teams in the NFL, that would have been a valid point. However, for a fan of the team whose previous starting quarterback was too hurt to practice at all for the final five weeks of 2002 but still played in and won each game in that period of time, that excuse wasn’t enough.

“With the game on the line like that, Steve would’ve gone back in there even if that ankle was broken,” I countered. “You couldn’t have kept him off the field.”

It was no exaggeration. McNair’s grit was legendary. He had ten surgeries throughout his career, including a 2004 procedure when doctors inserted bone from his hip into his sternum so he could keep playing football. That’s the type of quarterback McNair was. His greatness was about more than just his abundant skill, though there is a compelling argument that he was as good as Brett Favre. His legacy instead stems from the ridiculous amount of pain he put his body through in order to bring his team victory on Sundays.

After the loss to the Chargers, the Titans had a bye week, and Collins started the following week against the Miami Dolphins. When Collins left the game with a calf injury, Young came in and displayed more than enough mobility to suggest he could have started and played the whole game if he wanted to. If he wanted to were the key words though. McNair’s toughness and refusal to quit made Young’s lack of desire even more painfully disappointing for Titans fans. For a player whose physical gifts teased Titans fans for five years with his potential to be even better than McNair, Young didn’t have half the heart McNair did.

The Titans learned from their mistakes with Young and picked a quarterback in the draft this year with a McNair-like zest for running over linebackers, but no matter how good Jake Locker becomes, he’ll never be able to take the spot McNair earned in the hearts of Titans fans. Nobody can fill McNair’s shoes, because his passion and desire to give everything he had to the game were unmatchable. McNair’s invincibility and willingness to play through insane amounts of pain made his death at such a young age even more surprising and tragic when Nashville police revealed he died in his sleep, shot to death by a 20-year-old woman with whom he was having an affair.

Far too soon, one of the toughest quarterbacks to take down on the football field was taken down permanently by four bullets, and the world lost the man who defined what it meant to be a Titan.

RIP Steve “Air” McNair
February 14, 1973 – July 4, 2009

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Hank Koebler is an NFL / NCAA Football Writer and On-Air Personality. Hank's work as a journalist has been widely published and he's received numerous citations for his NFL coverage. You may email Hank @ hank.koebler@rotoexperts.com or follow him on Twitter @HankKoebler

Tags: Baltimore Ravens, Brett Favre, Fourth of July, Independence Day, Kerry Collins, Miami Dolphins, Sahel Kazemi, San Diego Chargers, Steve McNair, Tennessee Titans, vince young