What Were You Thinking?

Sunday’s Titans / Texans game could not have had a more poetic ending if I wrote it myself.

Un-freaking-believable.

Well, unless you’ve actually seen Vince Young lead come-from-behind wins before, as I and a multitude of Longhorn fans have. Like, say, at the Rose Bowl last January, where I was blessed to have witnessed in person one of the greatest college football games of all time. I can’t tell you how many people came up to me after the Rose Bowl and said “yeah, Vince is good and all, but I don’t think he will make it as an NFL quarterback.” Coach Royal has a saying about players with “it”. You can’t coach “it”, you can’t teach “it”, and I can’t tell you what “it” is, but if you understand “it”, you know “it” when you see “it”.

Vince has “it”.

I was listening to 610AM on the way to the Park & Ride on Monday, and Texans fans were in mourning. They know in their hearts that the team completely screwed up by not drafting Vince, and there’s not a thing they can do about it. Take a look at the national sports media scene – the Texans have become the laughing stock of professional sports. EVERYONE is piling on (ESPN, Jim Rome, FOX, The Houston Comical, Al Michaels on the Sunday Night NFL game – the list goes on and on.)

Vince is exactly what this franchise needed, and they blew it. Completely, totally blew it. Even the Texans’ radio team was gushing after the game – Andre Ware was going on and on about him and how VY gets better every time he sees him. This is from a former QB who terrorized the old Southwest Conference with the Run & Shoot and won a Heisman along the way.

I think it represents the low point of the franchise (which is saying a lot). I feel bad for Bob McNair, because I really think he’s trying to build a good team. Gary Kubiak gets some of the blame for this one, but mostly Charlie Casserly gets to own this disaster. Do you know that he was on CBS on 12/3 and had a list of the Top 10 young QBs in the game (with less than 40 starts), and Vince was not on the list.

I’m speechless that this man, who by all accounts was headed out the door based on his disastrous management of personnel during the first four years of the franchise, was allowed to convince the Texans “brain” trust that David Carr was their man and that Vince could not help the team. Utterly speechless. I won’t go so far as to call it a ‘franchise-killing’ mistake, but it’s a franchise-changing mistake, and this blunder has extended the rebuilding and misery for the Texans for years longer than it could (or should) have.

It’s like a slow-motion train wreck that will take 10-12 years to play out, but you know it’s coming and you can’t turn away from it. You know that you could have taken a different track and avoided the accident, but you chose poorly. It’s like that.

It’s still early, but I will go on record as saying that the Texans passing on Vince will rank up there as one of the biggest blunders in the history of professional sports – right up there with the Red Sox trading Babe Ruth to the Yankees and Portland passing over Michael Jordan to pick Sam Bowie. Can you imagine the Rockets without Hakeem Olajuwon? How about the Oilers without Earl Campbell? Neither can I, but we have the next best thing.

This is going to be painful for a while - Kubiak better hope that he can get Troy Smith (he has “it”, too) in the draft next year.

Today's Chronicle has a cartoon that says it all.