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- Mar 20, 2019
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No NFL award is ever clinched before the games even start. This year, one of them already may be.
Former Washington quarterback Joe Theismann, who suffered a career-ending broken leg in 1985, believes that current Washington quarterback Alex Smith, who suffered a supposedly career-ending broken leg in 2018, already is the NFL’s Comeback Player of the Year for the 2020 season.
“He has gone through a lot more than I had to go through,” Theismann told John Keim of ESPN.com. “For me it was a question of the leg healing and then trying to do certain things required of the quarterback position. Alex came within 24 hours of losing his leg. I didn’t wind up with complications; he wound up with a tremendous amount of complications. It wasn’t just healing from a broken leg. The mountain he had to climb is so much greater.
“No matter what happens he’s already won the award for comeback player of the year.”
Theismann added that he never believed Smith was done.
“I was pulling for him from day one,” Theismann said. “In the beginning everyone said he’ll never play again. I never bought that. Knowing Alex as I’ve come to know him and the determination he had. . . . Now he has a chance to go out and do certain things.”
The most certain and specific thing he can do is win the starting job. Given the unusual circumstances associated with the 2020 season, and in light of the face that Smith was the quarterback of the 49ers after the 2011 lockout and nearly led them to the Super Bowl, Smith could be the right guy to lead Washington’s offense.
Of course, he’d have to beat Dwayne Haskins out for the job. And Haskins by all appearances has done what he has to do to make the next step in his career, and to fulfill the potential that made him the 15th overall pick in the 2019 draft.