As Josh McCown listened to Carolina Panthers coach John Fox during a meeting Tuesday morning, something dawned on him.
“When coach Fox was talking, I realized it was the first time I've been in front of a head coach that's been in that place for more than a year,” said McCown, a backup quarterback obtained by the Panthers last week in a trade with the Miami Dolphins.
McCown has been around so much that he's become completely familiar with the unfamiliar. The Panthers are his fifth NFL team in seven seasons. Signed as a free agent by the Dolphins in the offseason, he never played a regular-season game with Miami.
And Jeff Davidson, the Panthers' offensive coordinator, will be the 13th coordinator McCown has played for since his junior year in high school (and that includes four seasons at Sam Houston State).
“I've learned a lot of offensive football,” said McCown who started 31 games in six seasons for the Arizona Cardinals, Detroit Lions and Oakland Raiders before signing with Miami. “My vocabulary has improved: There's five ways to call a hitch route.”
Still, McCown said he's not worried about picking up the Panthers' offense.
“Basically everybody runs the same thing (in the NFL),” he said. “People just have different philosophies. One team will do more of something than another team.
“The route concepts are for the most part the same. Some teams call them by numbers. Do you call it a drive route. Or a Seattle route? People call them different things. It's personal preference, I guess.”
McCown might have caught a break in landing with the Panthers from the Dolphins. Miami's offensive coordinator, Dan Henning, had the same job with Carolina from 2002-06. So maybe there's some common terminology in both teams' playbooks.
McCown's arrival in Charlotte is a direct result of Brett Favre's coming-out-of-retirement saga earlier this summer.
When the New York Jets cut starter Chad Pennington to make way for Favre, Pennington quickly signed with Miami, where McCown was competing with John Beck for the starting spot.
Pennington's arrival made either McCown or Beck expendable. It was McCown.
“When things changed in Miami – when we added Chad – I didn't know how the situation was going to work out,” said McCown. “It seemed as though from the get-go, they were moving in the direction of making Chad the guy. So I didn't know where I stood completely.
“But when you go through a second, third and fourth preseason game and you haven't played, I figured something was up.”
McCown figures to at least start the season as the Panthers' No. 2 quarterback. Matt Moore, Jake Delhomme's backup throughout the preseason, who bruised his left shin in the final preseason game against Pittsburgh last week, said he hopes to practice today.
“I don't know,” Moore said, when asked if he thought he'd been bumped to the No. 3 spot. “That's the coaches' deal. I'll be there whenever they need me.”
Moore played well as a rookie in the Panthers' final two regular-season games in 2007.
But McCown's experience and relative success – he's thrown for more than 6,500 yards and 35 touchdowns in his career – figures to make him Delhomme's backup.
“He's got great mobility, he's a good athlete and he's got a strong arm,” said Fox. “It's a matter of getting him indoctrinated into our system. We'll get him schooled up and go from there.”
McCown had a scare this summer when his finger was cut in a chain-saw accident. Seems his younger brother Luke – a backup quarterback for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers – accidentally cut Josh's finger instead of some firewood in their hometown of Jacksonville, Tex.
The cut took six stitches. It's all healed now.
“He just kind of nicked it,” said Josh McCown of Luke. “He must have known I was getting traded to a division rival.”
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