NFL: McNabb Overcomes Boos, Lewis Overcomes More

The NFL Divisional Playoffs will offer a story with every game, an angle unique to each other. This is where the season starts. The regular season, last week's games, mean nothing now. This is where championships are won. And sometimes, the players within the games have already won, win or loss.

Every quarterback from now on at Syracuse University will always have the spector of Donovan McNabb, the incandescent shadow hovering over them. McNabb was a cult hero in Central New York since his freshman year as an Orangemen. But all that changed on one day, one day where McNabb became not a hero, but the wrong pick.

Philadelphia Eagle fans wanted Ricky Williams in the NFL Draft two seasons ago. They wanted the Heisman Trophy winner, the running back with the pierced tongue and offbeat mannerisms. When McNabb was introduced as the second overall pick, they booed him. They booed him without thought, but with menace. He was the enemy. They couldn't love him like they would have loved Williams.

But McNabb smiled through the whole thing. He kept his cool during his initial training camp holdout, through his first season when he sat on the sidelines when not ineffectual on the field. Interceptions, sacks, they were part of the learning process. The curve that was accerlerated this season.

McNabb, with all apologies to Marshall Faulk, was the true league most valuable player this year. Even with Faulk, the Rams cannot get out of the first round. Without McNabb, the Eagles don't even get five wins.

Instead, they've got more than five wins, a lot more than five wins. McNabb's performance on Sunday against Tampa Bay, scientifically destroying and decimating a defense reveiled for its stinginess, was an exercise in efficiency.

If a receiver was open for five yards, McNabb didn't try to go for fifty. He went for the simple pass. If the opportunity to run was there, he took it. He didn't go for a run on every possession. McNabb was poised in the pocket and took advantage of whatever the Buccaneers gave him, big and small.

The credit must also go to coach Andy Reid. Reid and McNabb was in this reclaimation project together, the coach and the quarterback learning about life on top at the same time. Overcoming the loss of Duce Staley, a premier running back, would kill some teams. But Reid has somehow overcome it, thanks to a quarterback that even Philadelphia fans embrace as their own, without hard feelings or a single boo.

Boos is what rained down on Ray Lewis at the start of this season. He was the poster boy for bad athletes, someone who got off or murder charges by using his celebrity, or so charged by several critics. Lewis has come back from the boos and turned them, if not to cheers, to gruding respect.

Lewis is the best linebacker in the game. There is no disputing that fact. He is the heart of what is one of the best defenses the game has ever seen. He has worked hard on the field, trying to erase the memories of what happened off the field. He has changed his lifestyle from the parties to the practice fields.

A mistake was made in Atlanta during the Super Bowl, Lewis will admit that willingly. And while people say one mistake marks a person for life, it is only right that a second chance be given, even if half-hearted.

The second chance has been the turning point for Ray Lewis. He isn't going to be a celebrity, a commercial company's dream endorser, but what he is, is a great football player. He earned the right to be honored as the league's Defensive Player of the Year. He earned the right to be going to the Pro Bowl.

Lewis was in ESPN The Magazine recently, admitting that he wasn't the same player he was before his murder trial, he was a better one. He seems to be a better person now as well, choosing his friends more carefully, being more cautious out in public. Lewis has received the second chance that most people don't get and is taking advantage of it.

There can only be given credit for that. Instead of being in a prison cell, Ray Lewis is in the NFL playoffs. It seems a story too good to be true. It seems like this story is made up, like this story is being written with a rhetorical ending.

You don't have to like Ray Lewis. You don't have to go out and wear his jersey, chant his name, cheer for him like you would another athlete. But he has to get your respect. For what he came from, and what he has become.