History also suggests it won't end the way owner Jeffrey Lurie envisioned when coach Andy Reid and quarterback Donovan McNabb became the dynamic duo that led the Eagles' franchise into the 21st century.

Visions of multiple Super Bowl titles danced in Lurie's head when the Eagles became the dominant NFC East team for nearly half a decade. That stranglehold has come and gone and the trophy case at One NovaCare Way is still short a Lombardi Trophy.

Today's game against the San Francisco 49ers at Candlestick Park will be the 118th start of McNabb's career. Reid has been the head coach for all of them.

Only seven quarterback-coach combinations in AFL-NFL history have been together for more games than Reid and McNabb. With 11 games left in the season and four meetings remaining with NFC East opponents, Reid, McNabb and the 2-3 Eagles certainly have time to turn this around. But overall time is not on their side.

The seven coach-quarterback combinations that were together longer than McNabb and Reid went a combined 599-312-7 during their first nine seasons together. That's an astonishing .658 winning percentage. They made a combined 15 trips to the Super Bowl and won six league titles while accumulating a 48-31 postseason record.

From the 10th year and beyond, the same seven duos were just 134-128 with a 5-7 postseason record. The only coach-quarterback combinations to win a Super Bowl after their ninth season together were Pittsburgh's Chuck Noll and Terry Bradshaw in 1979-80 and Bill Walsh and Joe Montana in 1988-89.

One other duo - Tom Landry and Roger Staubach in Dallas - reached a Super Bowl in their 10th season together, but they lost to the Steelers in the 1978-79 season.

No coach-quarterback duo has won it all or even reached a Super Bowl after their 10th season together, which is the point that Reid and McNabb are at now.

Predictably, the seven duos in front of Reid and McNabb all have distinguished resumes.

Don Shula and Dan Marino, paired for 207 regular-season games and 13 postseason games, were together longer than any QB-coach combo in league history. Those two won 88 regular-season games and six playoff games together. Like Reid and McNabb, they went to a Super Bowl and lost, then never got back again.

Don't tell Shula that they were failures because they never won a title together.

"Dan was the best passer that ever played the game," Shula said. "He had a great arm and a quick release. I averaged 10 wins over a 33-year career. I'm pretty proud of that."

Shula, who won two Super Bowls with Miami and two NFL titles with the Baltimore Colts, and Marino were subjected to the same sort of criticism that Reid and McNabb receive these days. Shula knows the feeling.

"Oh, it got to the point where I wouldn't even turn on talk radio any more," Shula said. "I'd turn it on and then I'd get to work and I'd be thinking about what they said instead of what I was supposed to be doing."

Of course, even when Shula stopped listening, he still heard the criticism.

"Sooner or later, whether you listen or not, somebody tells you or it comes across your desk in some other way," he said. "You just have to believe in what you're doing and have the fortitude to move on with what you think is the right thing to do. The question about whether you're doing things the right way or not is always answered by the wins and losses."

Marv Levy, the former Buffalo Bills coach who spent 10 highly successful seasons with quarterback Jim Kelly, knows even more about the Reid-McNabb situation. Levy and Kelly went to four Super Bowls in a row and lost each one.

Had they won just once, the perspective of the two would be different.

"When you don't win it all, there's going to be criticism," Levy said. "I've lived here in Chicago my whole life and I watched the euphoria over the Cubs this entire season. And then they lost, the pendulum swung in the other direction.