TROUBL

Marlin Briscoe: The first black quarterback to start a game in the NFL.

It should be obvious at this point that Peyton Manning is a washed-up Loser who will spend most of the next five or six years floundering with the Colts, before a late-career rally thrusts him back to the playoffs for one last run in Indianapolis. He’ll find himself ending his career in a St. Louis Rams jersey, and after a final disappointing year in the NFL, he’ll work as a b-list commentator for Fox Sports. He’ll live in a pained state of lingering jealousy toward Tom Brady, who may never play professional football again, for getting out in time to be a legend, while Peyton is voted into the Hall of Fame out of some misguided sense of pity. That is the most abundantly clear lesson of the 2008 NFL season, and there isn’t a fan or commentator in America who doubts its veracity.

It probably also means that he’ll strike up a pen-pal relationship with John McCain, who has to see more than a little of himself in the Colts’ QB right now. Their paths are eerily similar, and as a person who writes about the parallels between football and politics, my greatest regret at the moment is that my man Vince Young wasn’t playing for Tennessee last Monday. The parallel would be the sort of thing that sets a liberal white writer’s heart a-twitter- as both former Golden Boy heroes fall to unexpectedly dominant upstart opponents, there’d be a very unique beauty in the leaders of the opposition both being black men in roles (Presidential candidate, starting quarterback) that are traditionally occupied by white dudes. Maybe it’s for the best that it’s not the way it shook out- Manning may be a Loser like John McCain, but Barack Obama is on a winning streak that clearly trumps even what they’ve got going on in
Nashville.

[though it seems heaven-sent...] One of the more interesting facets of the serious championship run Barack Obama has been on for the past month or so is that, if election day delivers the results that everyone expects (my old bookie, Paddy Power, has already paid out on his victory), he’s changed the face of what Americans think a leader
should look and act like. I don’t just mean racially- I mean he’s a cool-tempered, nuanced Democrat.
The Republican brand, dented though it may be, still runs on an authoritarian, it’s-okay-
daddy’s-here track. John McCain, in between his wildly erratic attacks on Obama that seem to come seemingly at random, is using that “I’ll stare down Putin, I’ll take those fuckers on Wall Street to task” approach as his only real selling point. For a long time, it’s seemed that’s the sort of leader- in any role, on any scale- that Americans like to see.

It’s possible, then, that until Barack Obama, what people really wanted their leaders to look like was Peyton Manning, or George W Bush, or Tom Brady, or Rudy Giuliani. There’s certainly anecdotal evidence for it- If you look at the campaign contributions of NFL players, after all, you’ll find that head coaches and quarterbacks favor Republicans almost exclusively… (Dennis Green is pretty much the only exception to that rule, but who wants his support?) It doesn’t prove anything, of course, but if Peyton Manning and John Elway and Dan Marino and Mike Ditka and Tony Dungee all identify with Republicans as to what a leader should look like, then there’s probably some connection there.

The flip side to this is that players in other positions usually favor the Democratic Party. And it’s not as simple as a black/white thing, where mostly-white quarterbacks and head coaches favor Republicans, while not-white players in other roles favor Democrats- while Emmitt Smith may give 100% of his political donations to Democrats, so does Brian Urlacher.

All of which is to say that the current implosion occuring on-field for Peyton Manning parallels that of the McCain campaign in ways that are more interesting than just “they’re both white and traditionally successful, and now they both suck!” Maybe the day of that kind of leader is passing on. We’ll see if Dungee tries to recruit Joe the Plumber to replace Tony Ugoh as starting left tackle.

[and elsewhere...] Whatever the face of American leadershipends up looking like- and any New England Patriots fan who was conscious last season can tell you about the dangers of checking off the final win before it’s all settled- it’s definitely moving in weird directions. A grizzled drunk is leading the NFL’s only undefeated team; a droopy-eyed kid with the worst beard in America has miraculously turned the Chicago Bears offense into one of the league’s best; even Daunte Caulpepper has emerged from retirement to quarterback the Lions. Meanwhile, previous stalwarts of the league’s leadership like Manning, Brady, Romo and Favre are either sitting on the sidelines or floundering on the field. It’s starting to seem likely that maybe leaders who don’t fit the square-jawed mold of the last couple decades are being given their chance. With that in mind, the consistent lead in the polls Obama’s been carrying since late September starts to seem less and less like an anomoly. And we’ll find out for sure just how this all plays out in a week.