By Adam Cancryn
Too many words on the man that frustrated and perplexed Giants' fans over five stressful years.
Kerry Collins is drunk.
Those are the four words I associate most with the NFL from 1999 to 2003, if only because my friends and I uttered that phrase every Sunday with the kind of frequency and dripping sarcasm it seems only young teenagers can both master and find consistently funny.
Those four words were somewhat rooted in truth. Collins, who in his second season quarterbacked the Carolina Panthers to the NFC Championship Game, made headlines in 1997 for a drunken rant directed at two teammates that was punctuated with racial slurs. Later in the year, he was arrested and charged with drunk driving. Together with his poor play on the field, his erratic behavior earned him a ticket out of Carolina. Following a brief layover in New Orleans, the New York Giants took a chance on the then 27-year-old. Collins went public with his alcoholism and entered rehab soon after.
Kerry Collins was a drunk.
Now, for us in the tri-state area, that Collins was an alcoholic didn’t matter much. He was signed as a backup, a low risk/high reward former Pro Bowler. He could be shoved off as quickly as he was reeled in. Collins got done with rehab and joined the Giants in time for the season, and normally that would have been the end of it.
But then he won the starting quarterback position nearly halfway into the 1999 season. And here’s the thing: Collins played like he was drunk. Never mind his background. Whether he’d marked each day with a swig of Jack or stayed sober his entire life, it didn’t matter. On the field, Collins swayed and stumbled like it was last call at the Meadowlands Saloon.
A typical Kerry Collins game: a solid opening drive that moves the ball through the air and on the ground with equal success. Collins, though navigating the pocket as smoothly as a one-legged hiker in the Andes, connects with Amani Toomer on a slant or flutters one to the impossibly tall Joe Jurevicious, always doing just enough to move the chains. The end result is a field goal, maybe a touchdown if running back Tiki Barber finds a seam.
The next series is an unmitigated disaster. Collins looks lost. He scampers around the backfield, slings it wide or too high and ultimately fumbles when a defender sneaks up and swats the ball out of his hands. Collins ends up on the sideline, hands on hips, staring into the middle distance. He looks only half there.
Third series, and Collins is a changed man. He’s near perfect, New York’s savior in spandex.
Then the next drive he’s back to being clueless Kerry. It was maddening.
***
Like anyone who’s been a certain type of drunk or been around someone who is that certain type of drunk knows, when you’re a certain type of drunk, you’re at all times mere inches away from both disaster or sheer brilliance. One decision, one last drink, separates you from waking up the next day a hero or a pariah. There will be no navigating through a successfully middle-of-the-road night. It’s all out. You’re either that guy or you’re that guy.
That’s how Kerry Collins played. He could stagger his way into 300 yards and a win just as easily as an interception and two fumbles. Hero or pariah, those were the only options.
As fans, we took that ride every Sunday, and it was never enjoyable. Even during the Giants’ 2000 Super Bowl run, each win only meant relief. We’d made it through another week. It felt like only a matter of time before the wheels fell off.
They eventually did, sometime within the first few minutes of that Super Bowl versus the Baltimore Ravens. Collins threw for 112 yards total and four interceptions. It wasn’t surprising or upsetting. It was freeing. My friends and I looked at each other and snickered:
Kerry Collins is drunk.
We spent the second half playing outside in the woods.
***
In fact, all of those ups and downs over the years somehow evened out to near perfect mediocrity. During Collins’ five years in New York, his passer rating index, which is normalized to a league average of 100, was 99. His completion percentage index (normalized to the same average) was 99.4.
Collins’ normalized touchdown and interception stats were slightly below average at 90.8 and 105, respectively, but those Giants teams were built on running and defense. He was a game manager before there were game managers. He damn well might have been the pioneer for future game manager quarterbacks. And compared to the game managers of today: Tarvaris Jackson, Alex Smith, etc., he might have been above average in that role.[1]
Collins left the Giants in 2003, after they signed Kurt Warner and drafted Eli Manning. He’s played in some capacity every year since then, most notably as the quarterback for Tennessee’s 13-3 team in 2008.
There, he was even more of a game manager. There, it all fell apart again, in the Divisional game versus the Ravens (again). There, his bleary-eyed, off-kilter heaves would prompt us, five years older but barely a day more mature:
Kerry Collins is drunk.
We would watch him for two more season best described as his late-night, jungle juice-induced blackout period.
***
Now, after a brief retirement, he’s back. Kerry Collins is an Indianapolis Colt, and by the looks of fellow quarterbacks Curtis Painter and Dan Orlovsky, the soberest of the bunch. Popular thinking is that Collins will start one, maybe two games while Peyton Manning nurses a neck injury.
On some level, this is amusing to me. The most stable, bland franchise of the past decade has enlisted the Coen brothers’ ideal western hero: old, half-drunk and headed toward his profession’s equivalent of a courageously bleak ending.
On another level, this fascinates me. Pro-Football-Reference.com says Collins’ career tracks closest with that of Jim Harbaugh. Harbaugh was the Colts’ quarterback before Peyton Manning. Collins was the Giants’ quarterback before Manning’s brother, Eli.
Collins is also just 111 yards away from passing Joe Montana on the career passing yardage list and seven touchdowns from passing Terry Bradshaw. Conversely, he is three fumbles from passing John Elway for fourth on that dubious list.
Mostly though, this makes me happy. Happy that I get to see Kerry Collins pitch and weave down the field once more. Happy that he’s not playing for my team. Happy that, for at least a couple more Sundays, I can message four words to my friends from all those years ago, wherever across the globe they may be, and they will understand:
Kerry Collins is drunk.
[1] An aside: I imagine that everyone has their own Kerry Collins: the guy they couldn’t bear to watch but who, statistically at least, was pretty solid. My dad’s was always Ken O’Brien, the Jets’ QB from ’84-92. From various other I’ve heard Neil O’Donnell and Bubby Brister.
Image via AP Photo/Julie Jacobson
1 comments:
Obsessed with Kerry Collins???
Sounds more like:
Adam Cancryn is on Meth.
Post a Comment