Why The Eagles Stink And Why ESPN Is Wrong About It

Not in any way, shape or form responsible for the Eagles' collapse

Thursday night, ESPN radio personality Robin Lundberg attempted to defend beleaguered Eagles coach Chip Kelly. "Point to one move," Lundberg sputtered, "That was that bad". The logic being, of course, that since there's no "disaster" move the definitively turned the playoff-bound Eagles into Tulane, there's nothing to see here and the Eagles' collapse can most likely be blamed on pixie dust, too much sushi, or the sudden difficulty in finding certain pieces of the Hooters' back catalog.

Bad Year For Philly

This is how it was supposed to go this year for Philadelphia sports fans.

The Phillies were going to be terrible, but we knew that, and at least they'd finally embraced the notion of the rebuild. Sure, old favorites were going to get shipped off, but we'd see fresh talent brought in, and there would be some glimmerings of hope for the future.

Shocking Move Out Of Philadelphia

EAGLES MAKE SURPRISE MOVE, CUT TIM TEBOW.

No. Let me fix that for you.

Top 10 Most Likely Philadelphia Eagles Draft Picks

Two possible Eagles picks working out at the team's complex

It has been an eventful offseason for the Eagles and their coach/GM/resident supervillain Chip Kelly. He has traded quarterbacks, signed quarterbacks, traded for quarterbacks that nobody thought he had any interest in, ditched running backs, signed running backs, and generally treated the whole offseason like one long day at DraftKings.com. That being said, it all comes down to this week's draft, and while various pundits have offered up their (almost inevitably wrong) predictions as to what the Chipster will do, we at Sportsthodoxy think we've got a handle on the ten most likely possibilities:

A Calm, Rational Reaction To the Tebow Signing

So the Eagles have signed Tim Tebow.

Speculation as to the likely reaction from the Philadelphia sports talk radio crowd below the fold:

An Eagles' Fan's Dearest Hope

Here is every Philadelphia Eagles fan's fondest wish:

So That Was Ugly (Panthers-Eagles Edition)

I'm out of town this week, but I can only imagine the wailing and moaning and gnashing of teeth back home over the Carolina Panthers' extended demolition at the occasional hands of Mark Sanchez. No doubt the drums are beating for the team to do something about Cam Newton - what "something" is, nobody is quite sure, except it boils down to "play better for less money" - and to burn Riverboat Ron Rivera and the front office in effigy for letting Steve Smith go. Sometimes, it is true, riverboats catch on fire and sink.

But the Sanchize Is Also Cursed

Insofar as I root for anything related to the NFL, I root for the Philadelphia Eagles. The Eagles lost their QB of record for the foreseeable future in Sunday's game against the Texans. This leaves them, at least temporarily, in the hands of former Jets punching bag Mark Sanchez, and Eagles fandom in the equivalent of the old "But the frogurt is also cursed" routine from the Simpsons. To wit:

The Foles Guy

So everyone in Philadelphia is freaking out because Nick Foles has apparently forgotten how to pass.

This is not true. (the "forgetting how to pass" part, not the "people in Philadelphia freaking out" part. Because I grew up in Philly, and if there is one thing the good people of Fildelfyuh do exceedingly well, it's panic on cue when calling in to sports talk radio. And make cheesesteaks. But mostly panic on sports talk radio.)

D-Jax Gone

We are never going to know all of the reasoning behind why the Eagles released wide receiver DeSean Jackson. On the surface, it seems like a really dumb move. Jackson was signed for three more years, he was in the prime of his career, and he'd just put up stellar numbers in new coach Chip Kelly's offense.

Kelly's offense is predicated on doing things really fast. Jackson is, for the record, really, really fast.

Cooper's Droop

Not Hanging With Mr. Cooper

It started with Riley Cooper, and it ended with Riley Cooper.

The season started, after all, with Cooper in the news for getting drunk and saying a bunch of stupid racist crap at a concert. It ended with a play Cooper didn't make, which is somehow fitting. And the Eagles player who was most upset with Cooper, cornerback Cary Williams, was off the field for one key play when New Orleans converted a third-and-long against his replacement. It's the ironies that make the narratives, after all, the little links that weave the web of what in hindsight looks like inevitability.

Your Upcoming Cowboys-Eagles Clash

Sunday night, the Eagles and the Cowboys go at it for all the marbles in the NFC East, which basically means "the chance to play a pissed-off Wild Card team from a superior division in the first round". The winner goes to the playoffs; the loser goes home. Adding spice to the mixture is the common knowledge that if the Cowboys don't win, coach Jason Garrett can start cleaning out his office, and the fact that Dallas QB/human lightning rod Tony Romo, who took PR lessons from Alex Rodriguez, is allegedly out with a bad back. Whether this is actually the case, no one knows, as the Jerrydome leaks rumors like a drunk contributor to Crazy Days and Nights. With that in mind, here are a few possible scenarios we'll see on Sunday.

(Bear in mind that very few of them involve the Cowboys actually winning)

The Night Before The Super Bowl

Not Pictured: Jase, Willie or Uncle Si (Special Teams)

The first Super Bowl I really paid attention to was after the 1980 season. (You want the Roman Numerals, you can get them yourself). It was the Eagles and Raiders, and I was living in suburban Philly, and all of us were entranced with our wacky Iggles. We had a 6'8" wide receiver named Harold. We had a quarterback nicknamed "The Polish Rifle". We had a star defensive end named Claude and a star running back named Wilbert and a middle linebacker named Bill Bergey who, thirty three years on, would have fit in just fine on Duck Dynasty. And we'd beaten the hated, the loathed, the screw-Santa-lets-throw-snowballs-at-these-guys Dallas Cowboys to get to the Super Bowl.

Eagles coach Dick Vermeil was really the prototype for the modern football coach, in that he ate, slept, breathed and dreamed work. He'd retire a couple of years later citing burnout, the result of too many years catching a few hours' sleep on a couch in his office at the Vet after yet another late night studying film. By all accounts he wasn't a Sabanesque tyrant or a Belichickian commissar, demanding complete autonomy over the team and infusing his job of coaching large men in tight stretchy pants with militaristic fervor, but he did up the bar on intensity and the sort of effort expected from coaches. The coaching landscape of today is thus an unfortunate part of his legacy.

But back in January 1981, that sort of intensity manifested the night before the Super Bowl in a fairly straightforward way: curfew for the Eagles. Rather than risk having his team get sideswiped by the temptations of the French Quarter - all they needed was for Louie Giammona to show up at gametime wearing beads - Vermeil sent Woody Peoples, Keith Krepfle and the rest of the boys to bed early. Their opponents, the Oakland Raiders faced no such restrictions. Led by Ringo Starr movie bit player John Matuszak, a guy nicknamed "the Mad Stork" and the finest football player ever to come out of Colgate (Mark van Eeghen), the Raiders stayed out all night, guzzled whatever the hell they felt like guzzling, and presumably dragged themselves back to their hotel fifteen minutes before gametime.

And then once the game started, they proceeded to beat the clean-living Eagles like they were Keith Moon's crash cymbal. It was over, for all intents and purposes, by halftime. There's a lesson in there somewhere, I suppose, but I don't think anyone ever learned it.

I-G-G-L-E-S

So the Eagles finally won one a couple of weeks back.

This is nice, in that people can stop tittering over the fact that until this past weekend, the Phillies had won more recently than the Boids had. It's been a terribly shocking year for Eagles fans, who expected that this year - THIS YEAR - was going to be the return to playoff glory. I mean, sure, last year was mainly a horror show of blown leads and late game three-and-outs, but there were plenty of reasons for it: new coordinators, injuries, the lockout preventing the Iggles from getting needed training camp time to learn new systems, you name it. This year, with a full training camp and coordinators settled into their roles, was going to be different. Michael Vick was going to be a beast. Andy Reid was going to learn clock management. DeSean Jackson and LeSean McCoy were going to run wild. The defense was going to, well, defend.
In truth, not so much. The successful Andy Reid teams of the Donovan McNabb era relied on two things: a monster of a middle linebacker and an O-line good enough to buy time for the short passing game. The Eagles haven't had a kaiju in the middle since Jeremiah Trotter, and the combination of an injury-depleted line and a quarterback who was never great at reading coverages in the first place meant that this year was doomed from the beginning. The nailbiter wins in the early going might have been fun, but despite a few exciting skill players, this was never going to be a good team.
Maybe Nick Foles is the future. Maybe he's just another A.J. Feeley. Who knows. What we can say we know at this point, though, is that the Andy Reid era's definitively over. It's been a fun ride, with a lot of success, but everything hits its expiration date. Even at his best, Andy had his weaknesses - clock management, curious play calling that got stars injured during blowouts, more clock management - and they leached the reservoir of fan goodwill that might have sustained his regime through a rebuilding phase. So at this point, it's a question of looking for bright spots in the wreckage of the season and trying to determine if they're optical illusions.
And next year will be better. Maybe.