“When you’re playing two quarterbacks, you don’t have a quarterback.”

Source: The late Paul Christman, former Missouri All-American and Chicago Cardinals star when he visited Lawrence in the early 1950s to do color commentary for a televised Kansas University football game.

His words resurfaced when I was considering how KU coach Mark Mangino and his staff are struggling to determine whether Kerry Meier or Todd Reesing should be their triggerman-of-record. After all they’ve seen of both guys, they ought to have a reasonable notion which one to install and stick with, barring injury. Why let a pointless controversy develop? Make a choice, establish flow and continuity.

Back to Christman, the first really good ex-jock TV analyst. He cited how the Chicago Bears were trying to decide on George Blanda or Ed Brown while they drifted. Just as quickly, Christman noted that the 1947 Kansas team was the perfect contradiction to his main-man premise.

In the same ’47 season when Christman was quarterbacking the Cardinals to the NFL title, Kansas was doing handsomely alternating Red Hogan and Lynne McNutt. Hogan was the better passer, McNutt the better run-game operator. Coach George Sauer got great mileage from their interchangeability – like a share of the Big Six title and the first bowl game (Orange) in school history.

Yet except for that one season, Kansas has never fared too well playing musical quarterbacks.

Everyone has a favorite in the KU quarterback sweepstakes. Many think we haven’t seen anywhere near what the bigger Meier can do; others are in love with the talented unpredictability of waterbug Reesing. Until 2007 practice begins, the staff will perpetuate the mystery. But the sooner a decision is made and the 1-2 pattern is settled, the better off the Jayhawks will be.

¢ The NFL and its pension-disability history have been in the news a lot of late, and though the NFL has closed many gaps in recent years, its early support for needy people who made it a cash cow was disgraceful.

Union huckster Gene Upshaw is fiercely defensive, and hall of fame player-coach Mike Ditka is justifiably aggressive about the slights of the past and the need for vast improvement.

Some figures: There are roughly 8,000 retired NFL players; only 317 actually get disability payments. There is wonderment why the NFL plan has spent only $20 million out of a $1.1 billion fund (that’s a “b”) for disability and pensions. I think a lot of former players and owners were horrible in taking so long to take better care of people who got them where they were – with Super Bowl winner shares going from $15,000 in 1967 to nearly $70,000 now.

A lot of these overpaid and ultra-benefitted modern turkeys never even heard of the Don Hutsons, Sammy Baughs, Chuck Bednariks, George Connorses, Marion Motleys and Bronko Nagurskis who played both ways and paved the way for the great portfolios today’s stars enjoy. Many, oh, so many, of those old-timers either suffered or died in dire financial straits because the “new” NFL with its growing riches took so long to help them. Look at ailing tight end John Mackey of the 1960s, who never has been covered the way he deserves. Now it’s too late for so many who earned so much better than the NFL and its aloof people provided them.