One thing we know about the current Vince Young situation: no matter whether he just happened to forget his cell phone or not Monday night went he went “missing,” family member were concerned for his emotional well-being. His mother confirmed as much today.

“What would you think, if you were tired of being ridiculed and persecuted and talked about and not being treated very well, what would you do? What kind of decision would you make?” Felicia Young said. “He may not want to deal with it [all], but you have to get to that point before you make that decision first.

“But we’re not talking about football right now. We’re talking about what would make him happy, and that is the most important thing.”

So yes: the dude is hurting. It appears the weight of the media, and the fans, and everything that comes along with being in perhaps the most high-profile position of all of American sports has rattled the man. (Though, he is in Tennessee of all places. Good thing he’s not in New York, eh?) But it was only a year ago that Young uttered these words:

Another of the five other African-American starting quarterbacks in the NFL has chimed in on Donovan McNabb’s recent comments regarding the differences in criticism of white quarterbacks and black ones. And, whether Titans quarterback Vince Young intended it or not, we get the feeling that he’s telling McNabb to quit whining. “I really feel like myself, black or white quarterbacks, we all go through something because that is the life of a quarterback,” Young said Wednesday, according to the Nashville Tennessean. “You have to be able to handle all the pressure and you have to be able to handle the losses and you have to be able to handle the media saying this about you. “If you can’t handle it, then you have to get off that position and go play something else.”

Yeesh. There’s a lot of “have to be able to handle’s” in there, ones that it seems Young himself can’t quite live up to right now. (Or has maybe ever in his career.) You couple his recent transgressions with the reports that he said he wanted to retire after his rookie season, and you get a man that for all the success he’s had, might not be cut out of the position of quarterback in the NFL.

And really: this is OK. If he’s an emotional wreck — and it’s been directly brought on by what he does for a living — then why continue to do it day after day? We see this as a different situation than most, because he’s playing a kid’s game, a role millions of us have acted out in the backyard growing up. How could he not love it? How could he not just forget about criticism and hang out in his pool of money? But really it’s no different than any other job in America. He’s like an accountant going insane after his twentieth 18-hour day in a row or a disgruntled postal worker — your job, no matter what you do, no matter how much you make, can leave you under the weight of the world.

Regardless of the sum, money doesn’t buy solutions to these types of problems.