Vince Young was not a perfect Quarterback.
I am sure in retrospect there are some things he wished he could have done better, but if they goal is to win games, that is what he did during his brief NFL career.
He makes a valid point that trash quarterbacks seemed to get far more opportunities for redemption than he did.
Here is what he had to say to SI.
Even when he exposes his vulnerabilities, revealing that he’s barely watched any football since he retired, he can’t help but say, “I’d see a quarterback and be like, Dude is garbage, and I’m over here in the kitchen cooking turkey necks!?” He’s reminded that the Cardinals recently signed Blaine Gabbert, a first-round failure who never achieved Young’s success, and he pounces: “Exactly. I hate to name-drop, but [Ryan] Fitzpatrick is still playing!? He leads the league in interceptions, and he’s still f—— getting paid? I mean, what the f— is going on?” (Fitzpatrick was third in picks last year, but Young has a point.)
Young also plans to expose his former head coach Jeff Fisher.
“I’m going to expose his ass,” he says of Fisher, who he claims stripped all the fun from football, pushing Young until he broke. Whereas Brown had been the father figure Young always wanted, Fisher, he says, acted like someone saddled with an unwanted stepson. Family members, close friends, even Young’s pastor describe Fisher as “jealous” and “envious” of the QB.
Young recounts closed-door meetings with Fisher in which both men agreed to keep their conversation private; the next day, he says, he’d read Fisher’s side—his exact words—in the local papers. Young says he would sometimes arrive early for a meeting, only to learn it had been canceled, unannounced, and that the coach was out fishing with Collins. (Neither Fisher nor Collins responded to multiple emails, phone calls and texts from SI.)
Young describes an incident from November of his rookie season when he left his ID at home before a road game against the Eagles. As he tells it, he went to retrieve it and was then held up by a funeral procession en route to the team plane, so he called Fisher to say he would be two minutes late. Young had seen Fisher hold the plane for other players, but this time he did not. “I feel like Fisher did that s— on purpose,” he says. “I’m pulling in, seeing them pull the door down. I can hear the team yelling.” As Young stood on the tarmac, grounded, he could only watch as the team he was supposed to lift into the playoffs soared into the sky without him.
Looks like this will be an interesting book when it comes out.
Young will be playing for the CFL this season in hopes of making an NFL comeback.