With a 90-man offseason roster for the first time ever and 32 total teams, that’s 2,880 NFL jobs . . . and Donovan McNabb owns none of them.
But he nevertheless believes that, when the total jobs are cut to 53 per team (1,696 total), he’s likely to have one. Appearing in studio on Thursday’s edition of NBC SportsTalk, McNabb said there’s an 80-to-90-percent chance he’ll play in 2012.
So which team will he be playing for?
“I have about three teams that I’m looking at,” McNabb said.
But McNabb would identify none of them. More importantly, it’s not clear at all whether the teams he’s “looking at” are in turn “looking at” him.
He’s most interested in teams with a “solid running game, weapons on the outside, a defense that’s been playing well and playing well together, and that’s ready to win right now.” McNabb seemed to acknowledge that teams fitting that description may have to have “things . . . go wrong” in training camp.
Chiming in on the debate launched earlier this week by LaDainian Tomlinson, McNabb also said that he didn’t play “for the individual accolades and the individual rewards,” and that his goal was (and apparently still is) to win a Super Bowl.
The closest he’s gotten, of course, is to play in one. And since it wouldn’t be a Donovan McNabb interview without a mention of Terrell Owens, McNabb said he believes the Eagles still would have played in a Super Bowl even if Terrell Owens hadn’t joined the team in 2004.
We’ll never know whether he’s right. As to whether his assessment of his chances of playing again are accurate, we’ll know soon enough.