This may be an overreaction to what happened yesterday in Detroit, but Michael Wilbon of the Washington Post predicts that Donovan McNabb will not re-sign with the Redskins this offseason.
With just over two minutes remaining and the Redskins trailing the Lions by only one score in the fourth quarter on Sunday, Mike Shanahan pulled McNabb and inserted Rex Grossman at quarterback. On his first play, Grossman was hit, lost the ball and Detroit’s Ndamukong Suh scooped it up for a 17-yard score.
Following the game, Shanahan told the media with a straight face that Grossman gave the Redskins their best chance of winning. After he was finished laughing, it had to have hit McNabb that his head coach doesn’t have complete and utter faith in him to get the job done.
Wilbon, who is a close friend of McNabb’s, doesn’t “believe for a second that Donovan McNabb’s gonna be here next year now.” Not a total surprise given what transpired on Sunday. But the Redskins haven’t been overly aggressive in re-signing him either, so maybe both sides have already soured on each other.
One would think that Shanahan wants to draft and develop his own quarterback. McNabb was a way to make the Redskins more competitive (which they have been), but Shanahan knows that this team is too devoid of playmakers on the offensive side of the ball to be playoff contenders. And by the time they’re ready to compete for a postseason berth, McNabb will be well past his prime.
That said, the hot topic right now is how Shanahan benched McNabb. So it’s not surprising that one of the first articles out of Washington was from a writer stating that McNabb won’t be back next year. The key, however, is that the writer is Michael Wilbon, who doesn’t throw crap against the wall just to see if it’ll stick. He’s well respected in the D.C. area and he knows McNabb, so maybe he’s onto something.
