The question to wrestle with, as always, is what exactly constitutes a comeback? Does the award extend to cover a return from injury, or ineffectiveness, or irrelevancy, or as in Vick's specific case, even incarceration? And was Vick already "back'' last season in the most literal sense, and thus isn't really staging a comeback in 2010, unless you consider him now fully back in comparison to the relative insignificance of his role last year in Philadelphia?
The answer is yes to any and all of these interpretations of a comeback. A comeback is in the eye of the beholder, and it can involve a return from anything that either kept a player off the field, or off the proverbial radar screen in terms of his profile or his previous standard of performance. And that's the way the award was intended to be framed, said AP sports editor Terry Taylor.
"We deliberately left it open-ended,'' said Taylor this week, noting that AP began the award in 1998, the year Buffalo Bills quarterback Doug Flutie won it with his triumphant season of work after returning to the NFL following an eight-year stint in the CFL. "You can come back from a lot of things. Injury. Irrelevancy. Any sort of personal adversity. We have left it to our voters and entrusted them with making a choice as to what a comeback is. But it's purposely left undefined.''
