mcnabb

McNabb Face. It’s the smirk he’d put on after mouthing a “my bad” after a his bad. We’d see it during post-game press conferences. And as Mike Freeman says so well over at Bleacher Report, “McNabb was always determined to show that nothing bothered him. Even when we’d speak one-on-one: McNabb Face. He rarely let his guard down.”

But McNabb Face isn’t the main issue in Freeman’s piece. It’s what is in-between the lines: McNabb has a drinking problem.

We know that someone who gets two DUIs isn’t fine. Something’s wrong …

McNabb’s first DUI arrest resulted in a day in jail. This time, McNabb could get more significant time.

A spokesperson for Fox Sports, for whom McNabb is currently an analyst, did not return an email seeking comment. He is “stepping away from his NBC sports radio show—at least temporarily—to deal with ‘personal issues,'” according to TMZ.

Over the past few weeks, while working on another story, I have heard some of the same things TMZ reported. People close to McNabb that I’ve spoken to have been concerned about him for some time. They say he has refused advice to take car services in the past …

I’m told that after the first DUI arrest, McNabb’s friends tried to show the danger he was putting himself and others in. They said McNabb didn’t seem to digest the point. The fact he now has a second arrest seems to back that.

One person close to him said he hopes this arrest shakes McNabb into realizing something needs to change.

According to the CDC, the average drunk driver has driven impaired 80 times before getting caught. It certainly sounds like impaired driving was an issue for McNabb before his first arrest, and since. This isn’t a two-time mistake, and is likely the sign of someone with a bigger problem. In many cases, someone in the public eye who gets two DUIs, after their legal issues pass, will put out some kind of boilerplate statement and head into a treatment program, whether they’re committed to it or not. But it seems, as implied by Freeman, that if McNabb doesn’t find himself committed to changing something, this is not going to go away.