Michael Ventre

There are two approaches to building a championship football team.

The first hinges on competition. Every position is up for grabs. No job is safe. This method fosters an aggressiveness that is essential to football success.

The second involves designating incumbents at some, if not all, positions on the field. This plan creates a feeling of entitlement among certain players and resentment among others, and it often translates into uninspired play and poor attitudes.

The layman might wonder why any sane football coach would choose the second option, since it can end in a dismal season and as well as the loss of employment for said coach. And indeed, the vast majority of football people tend to lean toward the competitive model because of its long and unassailable history of producing positive results.

Yet occasionally a practitioner comes along who likes to march to his own drummer, even if that means stumbling and falling along the way. Surprisingly, Donovan McNabb may have revealed himself to be such an individual.

The Eagles’ quarterback recently said he was “shocked” when the franchise drafted Kevin Kolb of Houston as its first pick in the 2007 NFL draft. But it wasn’t the typical brand of draft-day shock that sometimes causes Mel Kiper, Jr. to throw his hands up and declare that a particular team doesn’t understand the draft, or that triggers bedlam in 31 other war rooms.

If you read between the lines, what McNabb was saying is that he expects to be handed the Eagles’ starting quarterback job, and he’s miffed that anyone would think otherwise.

There are other factors involved in McNabb’s situation besides the hoarding of practice reps and game starts. He is owed a lot of money under his current contract — $5.5 million in 2007, and increases considerably through 2010 — and he’s been only slightly more productive for the Eagles than Carl Pavano has been for the Yankees.

That might be an exaggeration. But if McNabb can use the word “shocked” to describe how he felt when his employers decided to bring in some competition at his spot, then I feel reasonably comfortable going to the Pavano card.

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At the end of last season, McNabb did not play because of a knee injury. That wasn’t his fault, of course. But it isn’t about that for a professional football organization. It’s about getting a healthy body out there to do the job. Jeff Garcia did a splendid job filling in at the end of the 2007 season, which served to remind Eagles fans that there’s an alternative to ironclad incumbency. Compounding the issue is that it marked the second straight season that McNabb was unavailable down the stretch because of health issues.

Garcia signed with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, which is interesting because he went there without a guarantee of a starting job and knowing that competition will exist between he and Chris Simms. He went there for a variety of reasons, one of which is the chance to win the starting job.

How can you expect people to believe you can be a winner of football games if you’re not willing to compete to win a starting job?

In “The Godfather: Part II” Hyman Roth offers a bit of wisdom to Michael Corleone: “This is the business we’ve chosen.” In that context, he was reminding Michael that certain aspects of organized crime might sometimes seem unsavory or even abhorrent, but it’s important to take responsibility for selecting that line of work and not whine about it.

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