It's difficult to describe Warner, when he's on, when he's '99 Warner, as anything other than bionic. He is a robotically constructed quarterback machine, showing no emotion, no fear, no joy, no panic: He throws the ball exactly where it's supposed to go because that's where it's supposed to go. It's not the chaos of Favre, or the nerdy precision of Manning, or the All-American faux heroism of Brady. There's nothing to it at all: Warner just hits exactly his spot and then jogs down the field to do it again. It's unnerving. It's inhuman. It does not compute.I may have told this story before -- in the first season of the Vai Sikahema Football League (1999), I had drafted the Rams' Trent Green as my quarterback in the fifth round. As you may recall, he was injured in the preseason, and it occurred to me just before the season started that if I believed in the Faulk-led Rams offense that much I might as well take a flier on his replacement before the season starts -- because if he did well in week one, I might not be able to obtain him via waivers. You know the rest.
Kurt Warner plays like football like most people take out the mail, or pour milk on their cereal, or pump gas. He just happens to be brilliant at it. There is no mess. He is a reasonable, removed man playing a savage game, and he barely seems to notice.
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
YES, BUT I WOULDN'T EAT THAT FROOT LOOP AFTERWARDS: Will Leitch pens an appreciation of Kurt Warner, whose final NFL game could come any Sunday:
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