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McNair: Gasping for air Titans' QB frustrated with offense -- but who can argue?
Posted: Tuesday January 25, 2000 12:23 PM
By John Donovan, CNNSI.com ATLANTA - He's led the Tennessee Titans to the Super Bowl, yet Steve McNair is not entirely happy with the constraints of his team's run-and-dink offense. McNair wants to throw the ball. He wants to wing it like he did back in the old days. "Yeah, it's frustrating at times," McNair said in Nashville. "But I'm not going to criticize how we do things because we're winning ballgames." The Titans' quarterback knows he's 12-2 as a starter - and in the Super Bowl -- in part because of that mind-numbing offense. But he also remembers when he was known as "Air McNair" in college at Alcorn State, and still yearns to open up. At least, now and then. "I threw for over 4,000 yards every year in college," McNair said, "and now you have a balanced attack ..." McNair is one of a rare breed in the NFL, a young quarterback who has been allowed to mature in an offense that doesn't rely solely on him. Some may think he's been brought along too slowly. But even McNair admits that the two years he spent as a backup to Chris Chandler, when the Titans still were in Houston, probably were good for him. At this point, the Titans sure think so.
"We had decided how we were going to do it," general manager Floyd Reese said after McNair ran for 91 yards, slipped in for two short touchdowns and threw for another in the Titans' wipeout of the Jacksonville Jaguars in Sunday's AFC Championship. "And we stuck to it." What the Titans have done is remarkable in an age where quarterbacks are tossed into the breech -- and then often discarded -- all the time. Coach Jeff Fisher and his staff slowly have built an offense around McNair, including using their first-round pick in '96 to draft workhorse running back Eddie George. All the while, coaches have hammered into McNair the nuances of playing quarterback in the NFL. They have worked on teaching him to be a pocket passer, taking him through his reads, getting him to dump off the ball rather than force the pass into coverage or take off running. And even though his passing numbers are strictly average, for a quarterback who is wrapping up only his third year as a starter, no one can argue with the results. "You have to surround a quarterback with good people. I don't think there's a quarterback in the league that can do it by himself," Fisher said. "We started up front with our offensive line and moved to your tight ends, your receivers and your backs. We surrounded him with good people and made the most of his abilities still at a very young part in his career." The slow approach took some getting used to, and McNair admits it's still difficult at times. He gets to take a shot downfield once or twice a game (his opposite part in Sunday's game, St. Louis' Kurt Warner, goes deep that many times a quarter), but that's about it. And so McNair, the "other" quarterback in this year's Super Bowl, remains cast as the good team player. "That's been our approach," he explained after the win against Jacksonville. "To get Eddie started. And if we had to pass the ball, we could also do that." Critics say that Fisher and his staff should use McNair's scrambling ability to get him out of the pocket where he can create more. But Fisher insists that teams are so "edge conscious" against McNair that he never gets that chance. Exciting ... no. Frustrating ... sure. Effective ... so far.
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