THE MALCOM X-FACTOR: QB Shift Costly in NFL as in Ivies

Here we go again.

Things are going pretty well, I thought. Sure, not as well as they could, but it’s not time to hit the “panic-button.” We’re still in this thing, and our biggest problems go far beyond the guy under center.

Unfortunately for me, I’m not the coach of the Denver Broncos—Mike Shanahan is.

He’s the coach of a Denver team that sits at 7-4, tied for second in the AFC West and still poised to grab a Wild Card spot in the NFL playoffs less than six weeks away. And it was his decision to name rookie Jay Cutler the starter for the final five Bronco games, replacing the inconsistent, oft-criticized Jake Plummer at quarterback.

Being from the Mile High City, it’s no surprise that I’m a pretty big Broncos fan. Besides the powder blue of the Nuggets and the crimson we all know and love, as far as I’m concerned, orange and blue are the most important colors in the spectrum.

So when I heard of Shanahan’s decision, my emotions ran wild. I felt a strange sense of déjà vu. I’d seen something like this before.

With Cutler taking over for Plummer calling the signals, you can understand why I’d have some reservations. You see, this isn’t the first time uncertainty at quarterback has helped derail a smooth-running, well-oiled train of football success in the middle of the season.

It’s happened before—right here at Harvard.

I’m sure you know the story. Five games into a season full of promise, potential, and wonderful possibilities, a quarterback change took place. Granted, when 2005 starter Liam O’Hagan took over for fellow junior Chris Pizzotti for the Crimson, it wasn’t because of terribly poor play by Pizzotti. Nor was it because Harvard used an eleventh-round draft pick and spent millions of dollars on O’Hagan’s services, like the Broncos did on Cutler.

At the college level, a coach has no incentive to play anybody except those who he thinks give his team the best chance to win. With no dollars or TV contracts on the line, we saw the purest of intentions acting when Crimson coach Tim Murphy sent O’Hagan, fresh off serving a five-game suspension for an undisclosed discretion, into Harvard’s Week 6 game against Princeton. It was to provide “a spark” and a different dimension to the offense, Murphy said.

And even when a coach makes the change for the right reasons, as far as I’m concerned, there’s a better than average chance that it won’t pay off. Case in point: the Crimson went on to lose three of its last five games and finished third in the Ivy League. And it wasn’t really O’Hagan, Murphy, or Pizzotti’s fault.

Aye, there’s the rub. It doesn’t matter the reasoning—a change at the most important position in football, possibly in all of sports, disrupts the flow of an offense. Especially an offense that’s winning more than it’s losing.

I’m not even saying Shanahan necessarily buckled under the pressure of the media, the multitude of critics, and the money when he placed Cutler at the helm of Denver’s offense. Plummer’s inconsistency—and the fact that he’s the sixth-lowest rated passer in all of football—scream for some kind of change to jump-start the offense of a team that’s lost three of its last five.

But a change like yanking your quarterback, a guy who led his team to the brink of the Super Bowl last year? It’s not the way to go.

Sure, the Broncos have an absolutely stout defense, but that doesn’t mean you should sacrifice one side of the ball because you know you’re going to get consistent progress on the other. Ask Mike Berg and the other guys who manned Division I-AA’s second-stingiest defensive line—they can only do so much, and if things are iffy on the field when they’re on the sideline, the whole team suffers.

I suppose that Mike Shanahan’s decision is a little more difficult than the one Murphy had to make. Shanahan no longer has an NFL-version of Clifton Dawson, his league’s greatest running back ever in the backfield to provide constant stability (Terrell Davis retired a while back, of course). And hey, the Denver media can be pretty nasty—they’re not as rational or sensible as we are.

I know he won’t read this, but if he does, I have a bit of advice for Coach Shanahan: think long and hard before you make that change, because it might provide a sour end to what could have been a pretty sweet season.

Granted, the San Francisco 49ers are no Yale, but I think you get the point.

—Staff writer Malcom A. Glenn can be reached at mglenn@fas.harvard.edu.