I have the chance every now and then to listen to Steve Young, the legendary quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, answer questions for five minutes.  The questions are asked by Michael Wilbon and Tony Kornheiser of the show Pardon the Interruption, but mostly, they just ask interesting questions and listen to what he says.

Recently, they asked him what a starting quarterback should do if he is out with an injury for a while and his replacement is playing better than he did.  There are rumors that the coaching staff is thinking of just keeping the new guy in the interests of, you know, winning more games. 

The tilt of the question had to do with whether that is fair to the starting quarterback.  I’m going to be a little free with my account of what Young said, partly because all three of us—Wilson, Kornheiser and I—were pushed back in our respective chairs by the force of Young’s response.  This was not, apparently, the first time he had had to face the question.

The way I heard the answer is that the quarterback should take full responsibility for the team’s lousy record, even if he was the only player on the team who was playing well.  It doesn’t matter.  Young didn’t go on to make it ridiculous and Wilbon and Kornheiser didn’t push him to do so, but it would not have been out of line with Young’s opening explosion to say that the quarterback should apologize, separately, for the inadequate blocking of the offensive line, the bad choices made by the running backs, and the dropped passes by the wide receivers.

And following that, he should express full support for his replacement, and pledge to do anything he can do to help his replacement succeed, including helping to corral any dissident players in the locker room.

Does this amount, as Young describes it, to agreement with the decision to replace him.  Absolutely not.  Does it require him to say that the coaching staff has treated him fairly.  Absolutely not.  It does not require him to meet any standard you would care to think of in assessing what the owner, the coaching staff, or the other players have done.

Why?

It is not because he could not make any number of good arguments.  It is because playing the victim will destroy him.  That will happen fast, as Young sees it, and it will follow him from team to team.  It will mark the end of his career as a successful quarterback with any team that would have him.  Taking the position I just described—I have been unfaired against—is going to have two really disastrous effects: a) it will direct his attention in the wrong direction and b) it is going to impede all the functions of the quarterback that happen faster than conscious thought.

There is a standard of fairness in the treatment of valuable football players.  It isn’t the same on every team, nor for every player, but everybody knows there is one.  How you have been treated by the team can be assessed with reference to that standard, but Young’s point, if I heard it correctly, is that no matter what judgment comes from assessing those behaviors in the light of that standard, you lose.  You lose because you are paying attention to the wrong thing.  If the weight of the evidence supports you, you lose; if it fails to support you, you also lose.

Nothing Young said had to do with what was fair.  He was concerned only about the costs of paying attention to fairness. You might have picked that up when I extended the quarterback’s apologies to the deficiencies of the offensive line.  It is not about you and imagining that it is about you will make you a poorer quarterback and, very likely, a former quarterback.

I am less sure about the second point.  I have heard Young make this point enough that I might simply have imported it into this argument.  Or maybe he said it the way I heard it.  I have heard him say several times on this show that he studied intensively the defensive alignments of the team they were to play next.  He did that, he said, because in the game, there will be no time to see and decide.  If you wait until you see what they are doing, it will be too late to respond to it.

But if you saturate your brain with that information and tie it to the actions you would have to take if, if, and if—then all the seeing and deciding takes place before you could be consciously aware of it.  You might be able, looking at film of the game, see what you must have seen at the time—two things you did not expect are happening and three things you did expect are not happening—but you were not aware of seeing those things at the time.  He describes a sequence that would have to be ordered like: I saw, then I acted, then I was aware of what I saw.  The awareness comes last and it comes too late to do you any good.  That is what all the study is for.  It is to make you aware of things you have not actually “seen” yet.

You see how delicate it is?  How intuitive it is?  Young’s point about the displaced quarterback is that if he pays any attention to what has been done to him, all that intricate timing will be trashed.  What works, Young says, are the merest spider webs of anticipation and inference.  None of that works if you are distracted by what they have done to you or, much the same thing, what you will have to do to prove them wrong.

That is what I think I heard.  Let me stop for just a moment to disqualify myself.  I was never a football player.  I did try to play basketball for awhile, but this precise skill that Young describes is what I was so bad at.  By the time I SAW the chance of a pass under the basket to a teammate who was cutting through the key, everyone else had already seen it and the chance was gone.  I never learned to sense, then act, then see, as Young describes it.

I am confident, however, that being unable to peel your attention away from the question of whether you have been fairly treated is deadly.  It does bad things to your work—whatever your work is—and it does bad things to you.  Young called it being eaten up from the inside.  That’s what I remember and I hope that is what he said, because that is true and it’s important.