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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Those of us in the VSFL will also recall that while the Rams were something of a hot dark-horse pick, nobody thought they'd be anything like The Greatest Show on Turf. I believe Marshall Faulk went with the seventh pick that year, because everybody was expecting a drop-off from his Indianapolis production. Isaac Bruce went in the second round, Torry Holt probably somewhere in the middle rounds.
ReplyDeleteDidn't you have Faulk *and* Edge on that team? I know I got Marvin Harrison and Jimmy Smith at WR in rounds 3-4, and that Olandis Gary ended up being my most reliable RB. Oh, the good old days ... when I could win in that league.
ReplyDeleteI want not acquiesce in on it. I over polite post. Especially the title-deed attracted me to review the sound story.
ReplyDeleteI did have Faulk and Edge, and Muhsin Muhammad too. I balanced them out with Mark Brunell and the deadly Rocket Ismail/Darnay Scott platoon. I believe that Terry Allen was your #2 RB. I spent an awful lot of time that season thinking about David Sloan vs. Jay Riemersma.
ReplyDeleteI read Drew's hilariously obscene homage to "'99 Warner" in the Jamboroo before the game Sunday, and I'll be darned if the beast didn't come out firing. If Warner wasn't so non-stop mr. christian in his interviews, I would swear he was a zen monk when he's on like that.
ReplyDeleteTerry Allen was involved, but also Errict Rhett. That was a year -- Cecil Collins! Jonathan Linton!
ReplyDeleteI recall that ESPN leagues didn't even have Warner available for pickup until after the first game - I announced, repeatedly, to anyone in the FFL chatroom (especially the moderators) how inexcusable that was. I got him in two leagues - one on waivers, and one in a widely derided trade involving Drew Bledsoe (hint: it was almost unanimously thought that I was massively overpaying). I won both leagues. I think my win in FBC this year was my first league title since then.
ReplyDeleteBut Terry Allen kept putting up good games for you in the 10-15 point range. It amazed me every single time. I was like "Terry Allen AGAIN, really?" You'd think at some point I would decide that he was a decent player, but no.
ReplyDelete