How Donovan McNabb’s Year With the Redskins Fell Apart Faster Than Anyone Expected
On Easter Sunday 2010, the Philadelphia Eagles traded Donovan McNabb to the Washington Redskins for a second-round pick (37th overall) and a conditional third- or fourth-rounder in 2011. McNabb had just thrown for 3,553 yards and 22 touchdowns with 10 interceptions the season before, posting a 92.9 passer rating. He was 33 years old. He was not washed up. Fourteen months later, he was out of football entirely.
McNabb had been the Eagles’ starting quarterback since game 10 of his rookie season in 1999. In Philadelphia, he went 98-62-1 as a starter. Five NFC Championship Games. One Super Bowl. Six Pro Bowl selections. When the trade came through, Eagles chairman Jeffrey Lurie called him “more than a franchise quarterback” and said he hoped to see McNabb enshrined in Canton. Three days later, McNabb was posing in burgundy and gold at Redskin Park in Ashburn while Mike Shanahan held up his new jersey for the cameras.
Why the Eagles Actually Made This Trade
Andy Reid told reporters as recently as April 1, 2010 – four days before the deal – that McNabb would remain Philadelphia’s starting quarterback that season. Then the Eagles traded him within the division, which almost never happens with players of McNabb’s caliber. The real reason: Kevin Kolb. The Eagles had drafted Kolb in the second round in 2007, and the organization had decided he was ready. They needed McNabb to have value as trade currency before that window closed. A quarterback coming off a 92.9 passer rating season is worth two picks. A quarterback a year older with question marks is worth less.
McNabb said later that he never wanted to leave. “Every year for the last three or four years, it was the same drama,” he told reporters. He was happy the uncertainty was over, but Washington wasn’t where he’d envisioned his career going. He’d hoped to finish in Philadelphia. He made the best of it publicly, saying he was eager to work with Shanahan and his two Super Bowl rings. Behind the scenes, per people familiar with the situation, there were concerns from the coaching staff almost immediately about whether McNabb could absorb a new system after 11 years running Andy Reid’s offense.
Week 1 Through Week 8: The Season That Looked Fine on the Surface
Washington beat Dallas 13-7 in Week 1. McNabb managed the game efficiently, nothing spectacular, but the Redskins hadn’t beaten the Cowboys to open a season in years. There was real optimism in the building. Through the first eight weeks, Shanahan told reporters McNabb would remain his starter. McNabb won in Philadelphia on October 3, a 17-12 road win over the Eagles, which briefly felt like the story of the year – former franchise quarterback beats his old team in his return. Three of his five wins as a starter that season came against 2010 playoff teams: Philadelphia, Green Bay, and Chicago.
Then, on November 15, the Redskins signed McNabb to a five-year extension worth $78 million, with $3.5 million guaranteed immediately and a $10 million bonus due at the start of the 2011 season if he wasn’t cut or traded. That same evening, the Eagles came to FedEx Field on Monday Night Football and won 59-28. Michael Vick threw for 333 yards and four touchdowns. He ran for 80 more yards and two additional scores. McNabb went 17-of-31 for 295 yards with two touchdowns and three interceptions. The Eagles set a franchise record for offensive yards in a single game: 593. The Redskins had just given McNabb $3.5 million in guaranteed money hours before the worst loss of his career.
The Benching in Detroit – and the Explanations That Didn’t Add Up
October 31, 2010. The Redskins were playing the Lions in Detroit with under two minutes remaining. Washington had the ball, down by three, needing a field goal to tie. Shanahan pulled McNabb. Rex Grossman came in. The Redskins lost. Afterward, Shanahan offered an explanation: McNabb didn’t know the plays in the two-minute offense well enough. Grossman had been in the system for a year in Houston, so Shanahan said he trusted him more in that situation. Players on the field were reportedly baffled. Albert Haynesworth, standing near the Gatorade cooler on the opposing sideline, said he walked over to McNabb assuming he’d been injured. “I mean, that’s Donovan McNabb on your team,” Haynesworth said. “I would always keep him out there on the field – no matter what.”
The next day, Shanahan changed his explanation. Now it wasn’t about play knowledge. It was about McNabb’s “cardiovascular endurance.” Shanahan claimed he had made the decision during the week that he would remove McNabb from two-minute drill situations because he wasn’t confident in his conditioning. McNabb had been nursing a hamstring injury that week. ESPN’s Chris Mortensen reported shortly after that dissatisfaction with McNabb had been building inside the organization all season, and that Redskins brass had actually discussed benching him after the Week 4 win over Philadelphia. That’s worth sitting with: they won the game and still talked about benching him.
The two explanations – plays not learned, cardiovascular fitness – don’t resolve neatly into each other. One is a knowledge problem. The other is a physical one. Shanahan later admitted he should have handled the Detroit situation differently. “I should have been a little bit more honest than I was,” he said in January 2011. He never clarified which version of events was accurate.
What the Offense Was Actually Asking McNabb to Do
Sources with knowledge of the situation told reporters at the time that Kyle Shanahan’s version of the West Coast offense had very few screens, check-downs, or hot reads built into it. Those were central to what Andy Reid’s offense in Philadelphia had asked McNabb to do throughout his career. McNabb was repeatedly asking for more of those elements. The answer, according to one source, was essentially: this is the system, adapt to it.
One longtime NFL executive, quoted anonymously at the time, framed it plainly: “It’s all about the system there, but the system isn’t working. How do you make the decision to trade two picks for McNabb, then give him an extension and then bench him? What’s the plan there?” Players on the roster told reporters they believed McNabb was being used as a scapegoat for some of the shortcomings of Kyle Shanahan’s offense. Two NFL coaches contacted by reporters said they believed the staff had been too rigid with McNabb and had failed to adapt the scheme to his strengths. Kyle Shanahan, for his part, had worked with Rex Grossman in Houston and reportedly viewed Grossman as a better fit for the offense as constructed.
McNabb’s bootleg and play-action passing – things he’d done well in Philadelphia for years – didn’t fit cleanly into what the Redskins were asking quarterbacks to do. That’s not entirely on McNabb. A 33-year-old quarterback in his first year of a new system, with a limited receiving corps and an offensive line that struggled, learning a scheme that wasn’t built for him. His passer rating in 2010 was 77.1. The last time he’d posted a rating that low was 1999 – his rookie season, when he started only six games.
December 17 and the End
Shanahan demoted McNabb to third string on December 17, 2010, behind Grossman and backup John Beck. He made clear McNabb would not play in any remaining games under any circumstances. McNabb’s agent, Fletcher Smith, went public: “The Shanahans – both Mike and more specifically Kyle – have made this an extremely difficult relationship to maintain. Their comments have been beyond disrespectful and unprecedented for a six-time Pro Bowl quarterback such as Donovan.” Players around the league noticed. Within the Redskins locker room, according to multiple reports, players were angry about the move. The organization had just paid this man $3.5 million in guaranteed money.
Shanahan told McNabb directly that he could not guarantee him a job in Washington in 2011. The $10 million bonus due at the start of the 2011 season suddenly looked like a problem. Washington finished 6-10. McNabb finished 5-8 as a starter. In July 2011, after the lockout ended, the Redskins traded him to Minnesota for a 2012 sixth-round pick. That pick became running back Alfred Morris, who rushed for 2,888 yards in his first two seasons with Washington. The Redskins got more out of the trade that ended the McNabb era than the one that started it.
What Both Teams Got From the Original Trade
Philadelphia used the 37th overall pick from the trade on safety Nate Allen, who started 54 of 64 regular-season games over his time with the team – serviceable, not transformative. The conditional pick eventually became a fourth-rounder, which the Eagles shipped to Tampa Bay for two picks. One of those became linebacker Casey Matthews. The other, traded again to Houston, netted linebacker DeMeco Ryans, who started every game in his two years with the team, and a later pick used to select Nick Foles. The Eagles did fine. They didn’t get a star, but the assets compounded into useful players.
Washington got one disappointing season, paid out $3.5 million in guaranteed money it couldn’t recoup, and traded away two real draft picks for the privilege of finding out that McNabb and the Shanahan offense were incompatible. Then they traded him again for the pick that became Alfred Morris. If you wanted to construct an argument that the Redskins came out ahead on the second McNabb trade, Alfred Morris would be your evidence – and it would be a short argument.
The Hall of Fame Question Nobody Wants to Answer Cleanly
McNabb has not been inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. The knock has never really been the Redskins season – voters understand that a 33-year-old in a bad system with a hamstring problem can post a 77.1 passer rating. The problem is more structural. Five NFC Championship Games, one Super Bowl appearance, and six Pro Bowl selections is a strong resume. The Super Bowl loss to New England in February 2005 – a 24-21 final where McNabb threw three interceptions and was visibly struggling physically – hangs over the whole career in a way that feels slightly unfair. He was playing through injury. The Eagles’ slow pace in the fourth quarter of that game, with the team down by 10 and the clock bleeding out, became one of those NFL moments that gets attached to a quarterback’s name forever.
37,276 passing yards. 234 touchdowns. A .612 winning percentage as a starter. When he hit 30,000 yards and 200 touchdowns, he was the fourth quarterback in NFL history to reach both marks along with 3,000 rushing yards – a combination that speaks to how difficult he was to defend. Joe Namath is in Canton with fewer wins. Warren Moon is in Canton with no Super Bowl appearances. McNabb’s case isn’t airtight, but it’s a lot stronger than the voters’ silence suggests.
What the Redskins chapter really did to his legacy was add a layer of noise that makes casual fans underestimate him. People remember the benching. They remember the “cardiovascular endurance” press conference. They remember the 59-28 blowout against Vick. One bad year in Washington – one weird, poorly managed, contractually strange year – ended up being the final image a lot of people carry of him as a player, which is roughly as fair as judging John Elway on the three Super Bowl losses before he won back-to-back with Shanahan in Denver. The irony there writes itself.
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