As Chandler Matures and Loses Chip on Shoulder, Falcons Have the Right Stiff

Katie Couric was talking to Bill Murray on the “Today” show Thursday morning, telling him it must be a real thrill--after being down and out--to hear the critics hail his performance in “Rushmore” as the best of his career.

Those TV interviewers can be so cruel.

If Bill Murray has been down and out, someone needs to check Atlanta Falcon funny man Chris Chandler for a pulse.

NFL historians point out that the term “stiff” did not come into common usage until the Indianapolis Colts drafted him in 1988. It’s now his nickname. You have Elvis, Cher and Stiff, none of whom needs any further identification.

Stiff has played for six teams, six bad teams. Mix a good team or two in there and you could understand if a guy got pushed aside because there’s simply too much talent.

But he has been with the Colts, Cardinals, Buccaneers, Rams, Oilers and Falcons, and they were starving for good quarterbacks. In Stiff, they got only a bad actor.

“That’s what I heard about him,” said Dan Reeves, Atlanta’s coach. “But the guy’s better than I ever thought, and there hasn’t been the other problems some people suggested.”

This week, Stiff has gotten the Couric-Murray treatment, critics fawning all over him for the performance of a lifetime after so many incomplete passes. Some have gone so far as to suggest that Stiff is the best starting quarterback in the Super Bowl, their fingers actually striking the computer keys to suggest he’s better than John Elway.

This kind of nonsense is very disturbing in the newspaper business, but very necessary. It’s a newspaper’s way of identifying editors, you know, the guys who can’t write.

“Sorry, Elway: Chandler is the better QB” read the headline in the Miami Herald with the future editor writing, “The best quarterback in this Super Bowl is many things, but this is what he isn’t: He isn’t named John Elway.”

Maybe Dan Reeves is writing under a pseudonym, Dan LeBatard, in the Miami Herald. It’s the only explanation. Elway has won 47 comeback games; Chandler has won 48 games.

Stiff has had a fine year, Elway a Hall of Fame career, and if you were betting your retirement IRA Sunday, advised ahead of time the game would come down to which quarterback played better, whom would you back?

“Very few people know the game very well,” said Stiff, explaining why he has been so misjudged and subjected to such disrespect.

Very few people find much to like in a guy who started the season 35-49 as a starting quarterback, and they didn’t even have to listen to him whine in the locker room about how it was everyone else’s fault but his own.

Who could possibly have guessed that Stiff was going to be a hit this year?

“The thing that I’ve learned is not to care what people think,” said Chandler, who has had almost as many injuries as touchdown passes in his career. “When you get a label, good or bad, it sticks. I’ve learned not to care about things I can’t control and there are quite a few things I don’t care about.

“It’s not any different than the general managers who said, ‘He’s not any good and let’s get rid of him.’ There are very few people who really understand this game.”

Didn’t he just say that?

“I could really care less what people think--whether they think I’m really good or they don’t.”

Now that’s a change from his flop-around days when he was known as a back-stabber, immature and destructive in the locker room.

“I was always angry,” he said. “Football wasn’t much fun. . . . I’d get upset. I’d wish there was something I could do about it. I’d think, ‘What can I do to change it?’ and it took a lot of my focus away from just playing football.

“I talk about being immature and that’s kind of what it was. As a young guy, I said things to the media that I shouldn’t have said. I reacted, I pouted around, things like that. It was the wrong way to handle it, but that’s what I did at the time.

“Once I got to the point where I believed in myself and my maturity level went up, I learned I couldn’t control any of that and why care about it? That’s when I was able to lighten up and just go play football.”

Is this some kind of campaign to win a new nickname?

A check of the Falcons’ roster did not produce one whispering player ready to bad-mouth the starting quarterback. Reeves went so far as to describe him as being tough, and that’s like breaking into regular programming with a news bulletin.

He threw for 3,154 yards this season, a personal-best. So were his 25 touchdown passes. Someone keeps track of this stuff and pointed out with particular glee to Stiff’s critics that he had 45 touchdown passes in his last 28 games.

“It’s just nice to finally be in a situation where I have a head coach and a front office that backs me 100% and really has given me all their faith,” he said. “That’s something I never had before.

“The places where I have been, it’s not very hard to look back and see that the coaches are mostly all gone and the front-office people are all changed around. It’s very obvious to them--not that keeping me would have been the right answer--but pointing the finger at me and getting rid of me wasn’t the answer either. They all know that.”

Now that’s how most folks remember him, with a little chip on the old shoulder pads. His father-in-law is crusty former 49er quarterback John Brodie, which explains, in part, some of his edgy attitude. And maybe a guy who has gone nowhere but to crummy franchises has the right to feel as if the football world has been dumping on him.

“It got to the point where it was like, ‘I’m never going to find the right spot,’ ” he said. “It’s hard to hang in there, and that’s one of the things I will look back on with my career. I never gave in to it. I kept hanging in there until I made something work.”

Making him the best stubborn Stiff in football today.