Josh McCown has officially hung up his many, many cleats. He shall be missed.

Josh McCown was like the football equivalent of a “that guy”. Those character actors who never break through to mainstream success but randomly show up in shows and movies and you yell out “hey it’s that guy! I know that guy!”. Chances are you saw Josh McCown every once in a while and each time he was on a different team. He even played in the UFL for a brief year. McCown never developed into a consistent starter but he tended to end up on bad teams. 10 bad teams, to be exact. He spent years backing people up and occasionally getting a chance to start. He was almost like a less malevolent Ryan Fitzpatrick.

If you looked up “Journeyman Quarterback” in the dictionary, you probably wouldn’t find anything because why would that be in the dictionary? But if you looked it up in a football encyclopedia, you’d get no pictures, because why would they have pictures for something as unimportant as a journeyman quarterback. But Josh McCown was the quintessential Journeyman Quarterback.

He just never went away. He played football at a mediocre level for 17 years. That can hardly be called a bad career. That’s a celebration-worthy career, quite frankly. It’s not like McCown spent that whole time on a bench. He played a fair number of games, especially in these past 5-6 seasons. I remember him coming in for Jay Cutler on the Bears and genuinely looking awesome for a couple of games, causing a mild QB controversy since Chicago hated Cutler so much. I remember him getting traded to the Bucs and then getting hurt, introducing us to Mike “The Neck” Glennon. I remember he looked okay for the woeful Browns but again suffered injuries. McCown wasn’t a safe football player. The man loves to ball. This was genuinely one of his best qualities. It’s fun to watch a player clearly enjoying the game. You see it a lot with these long-time backups. They finally get back out there and they just seem so happy to be playing again. They might suck, but they are gonna leave it on the field.

Josh McCown might have never been particularly great, but he left it on the field and he did it for 17 years. I’ll raise a glass to that.

COMIC UPDATE: Next week is gonna be a good week that will reward all of those with patience. I know you’ve been waiting for it. A lot has developed in the land of wealth this offseason, and it will finally be properly addressed. But it will be more than that. The richness of this story might never be the same. Stay tuned!