Akili Smith could’ve been the Eagles’ quarterback. Instead, he’s hoping the Bengals win Super Bowl LVI. | Mike Sielski

There are 19 former Cincinnati Bengals, Akili Smith among them, on a text chain that these days crackles with the kind of excitement and joy that few of them felt during their careers with the team. Takeo Spikes, Peter Warrick, Corey Dillon, more: All of them are thrilled that the Bengals are back in the Super Bowl for the first time in 33 years, facing the Rams on Sunday at SoFi Stadium. But if any of those players had reason to feel more wistful than the others, Smith might be the one.

A young quarterback, selected high in the draft, has led a once-moribund franchise to the brink of a championship. That quarterback is Joe Burrow, whom the Bengals took with the No. 1 overall pick in 2020. That quarterback was supposed to be Smith, whom they took with the No. 3 overall pick in 1999 – one pick after the Eagles took Donovan McNabb. It was an inflection point in Smith’s life and career. The memory of it and the ramifications of it are never far from his mind.

“I look at it all the time,” Smith said in a recent phone interview. “What if Akili goes to the Eagles and Donovan goes to Cincinnati?”

Nothing is ever so simple. Smith flamed out of the NFL after four years and just 17 starts with the Bengals, still regarded as an all-time bust to rival Ryan Leaf or JaMarcus Russell. It’s too easy to say that he might have had the career that McNabb had here – five NFC championship games, a Super Bowl appearance, the Chunky Soup ads, the status as arguably the greatest quarterback in Philadelphia football history – if only the Eagles had made a different decision on draft day.

But the gap between his unfulfilled expectations and McNabb’s tangible excellence obscures the truth of that moment in time: In a draft in which five quarterbacks were among the top 12 picks – Tim Couch, McNabb, Smith, Daunte Culpepper, Cade McNown – the Eagles considered seriously the idea of selecting Smith. And only Andy Reid’s insistence that McNabb was the surer thing stopped them from taking a chance on a player who, at the University of Oregon, had risen like a rocket to become the Pac-10 offensive player of the year and an enticing prospect.

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“We probably had a larger quantity of people who preferred Akili or Culpepper, but Andy and myself were the two who were the strong believers that Donovan was the right person to pick,” former Eagles president Joe Banner said. “It was very close. We all liked all three quarterbacks. We just had to figure out how to order them. There was a little bit of luck and some intelligence in the fact that we did end up with the best of the three.”

Having grown up in San Diego and spent two years in junior college, Smith transferred to Oregon and played 11 games for the Ducks in 1997. He later told his agent, Leigh Steinberg, that while running around the university’s track one day, he thought to himself that it would be nice if, after his senior season, an NFL team happened to sign him as a free agent. Then he threw for 3,763 yards and 32 touchdowns in ‘98, averaging more than 10 yards per attempt, and so impressed NFL scouts at his pro day, particularly because of his size (6-foot-3) and arm strength, that he zoomed up teams’ draft boards.

“The ball never hit the ground,” Steinberg said of Smith’s workout. “It looked like the ball was being shot out of a cannon.”

On the night before the draft, Steinberg and his client went to sleep unsure of where Smith would be drafted. As far as they knew, the Browns could take him with the first pick or the Bengals could take him with the third. Their only certainty was that the Eagles wouldn’t be using the second pick on him. Reid had told Steinberg that McNabb was his man.

Had the Eagles been set on drafting the best thrower of the football – “I hate that term,” Banner said, “but that’s what people seem to use” – Smith would have been their choice. McNabb, though, had started at Syracuse for four years and played well in that year’s Senior Bowl, where he was coached by Reid’s friend Jon Gruden. That longer track record of success and the intelligence and insights from Gruden had persuaded Reid that McNabb was the right pick. In a calculation that turned out to be both accurate and ironic, Reid and Banner also reasoned that because McNabb came from a close-knit family and had a strong support system, he would be better equipped to handle being the Eagles’ starting quarterback. “We thought that Philadelphia would be a fairly tough place to play,” Banner said.

Sure enough, a group of Eagles fans who had traveled to Madison Square Garden for the draft booed when then-NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue announced that the team had selected McNabb. “I don’t know why they were booing Donovan,” Smith said. “Donovan put up some great numbers at Syracuse and did some fabulous things. It was the right pick.”

Tagliabue announced Smith’s name next. But the conditions in Cincinnati at the time, on the field and off, were not conducive to having Smith, or maybe any rookie quarterback, thrive. Those conditions included a healthy skepticism among the Bengals’ coaches and scouts about how good Smith really was. “There were a whole bunch of ‘em that came out that year, and by far, Akili was at the bottom of our list,” Bruce Coslet, the team’s coach then, told the Cincinnati Enquirer in 2017. “Then we drafted him anyway.”

The Bengals saw themselves as a small-market franchise and acted like one. Their practice field was old. The players’ per diems were tiny. For Sunday games on the West Coast, the team flew on Saturdays, not on Fridays. “One time, we asked for jock straps,” Smith said, “and they threw some used jock straps in the middle of the locker room.” Even Paul Brown Stadium, which opened in August 2000, just before Smith’s second season began, reflected the Bengals’ bumbling nature. Smith remembered a strange, off-putting odor inside the brand-new stadium. “I still don’t know what that smell was,” he said.

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More, the Bengals already had a quarterback who had been starting for them, Jeff Blake, which meant that their owner, Mike Brown, was likely to play hardball with Steinberg in negotiating Smith’s contract. If Akili doesn’t take what we offer, we’ll just stick with Jeff instead. Steinberg warned Smith and his parents before the draft that dealing with Brown promised to be difficult, and he suggested indicating to the Bengals that Smith didn’t want to have to hold out and preferred to play somewhere else.

“They did a prayer circle that night,” Steinberg said of the Smiths, “and they decided that if it was God’s will that he go to Cincinnati, they didn’t want to resist that.”

Smith held out for 27 days before agreeing to a seven-year, $58-million contract, and missing that time at training camp stunted his development. He started four games as a rookie, throwing six interceptions and just two touchdowns, and was named the Bengals’ No. 1 quarterback in 2000 before losing the job to Scott Mitchell. He partied too much. In February 2001, he was arrested on suspicion of drunken driving in San Diego’s Gaslamp Quarter. He fell into depression. In May 2003, the Bengals released him. He never took a snap in the NFL again.

“You get yourself in a situation where you’re the number-three quarterback in the nation in high school,” he said. “You’re number one in juco. You’re the Pac-10 player of the year. Then you go to the Cincinnati Bengals, and by year three, it’s pretty much already over.”

Would Smith’s career have gone differently if Reid, one of the league’s great groomers of quarterbacks, had been his coach, if he had ended up with the Eagles instead?

Nothing is ever so simple. “Andy would have made anybody better,” Banner said, but there’s no guarantee that Smith wouldn’t have made the same mistakes in Philadelphia that he did in Cincinnati. He is 46 and a private passing coach now, “part of the one percent,” he noted, because of that contract he signed. He was an immature kid then.

“I was trying to run away from the Bengals and everything we were going through,” Smith said. “It was the wrong thing for me to do.” He bears no grudge to the Bengals or the Brown family. “They finally got it right,” he said. It just took a while, 23 years too late for Akili Smith.