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Decade honors: T.O., Dawk and Rosenhaus

It seems fitting that the Eagles signed Andy Reid to a three-year extension during the same week in which SI.com released it's All-Decade package.

Reid is the second-longest tenured coach in the league. His team's have gone to five NFC championships this decade, and one Super Bowl. Yet neither he nor Donovan McNabb received any recognition in SI's package, which highlighted the decade's top moments, it's All-Decade team, highlights and lowlights, top free agent signings, draft picks and trades, etc.

That's not to say the Eagles didn't get any mention at all. But the ones they did get surrounded around Terrell Owens, Drew Rosenhaus and Brian Dawkins. Dawkins was the only Eagles player to get named to the All-Decade team.

Which made me think, when people look back on this decade 20 or 30 years from now, how will the Reid/McNabb teams be remembered? Will they be remembered at all from a national perspective, or will they be judged irrelevant because they never won a Super Bowl?

Nearly 5,000 of you voted in our online poll, which asked if the Eagles made the right move in extending Reid. About 66 percent said yes. 34 percent said no. Those of you who voted no likely say only one number matters: zero. The number of Super Bowls Reid has brought to the city.

For the record, I would have voted yes. Reid's good qualities outweigh his flaws. His teams never quit. The Jeff Garcia year. Last year's team that made a run after starting 5-5-1, and so on. He annoys us with his press conferences, but his players undoubtedly appreciate him taking the blame.

An underrated quality: Reid can build a staff. In a league where coaches are willing to throw their coordinators under the bus year after year, Reid has never pointed the finger. Instead, his coaches go on to bigger and better things and always credit him for their success. That counts for something.

This is not to say he's perfect. The criticism of game management is probably the most glaring and fair one, and there are others. But I do not buy the notion that you can't win a Super Bowl with Reid.

So it will be interesting to see how this run by Reid and McNabb is viewed historically if they end up without a Super Bowl. Locally, in time, I think we'll look at the era with fondness and appreciation, because there will without question be seasons of 6-10 and 7-9 down the road.

But nationally, it's tough to say what kind of imprint this Eagles group will have left on people.

Here are the Eagles moments/players that were mentioned in SI.com's package.

Peter King names Owens the decade's biggest villain:

The human distraction flitted from San Francisco (where he criticized quarterback Jeff Garcia's arm) to Philadelphia (where he said Favre would have been a better fit for Philly than Donovan McNabb) to Dallas (where he was a professional whiner if he didn't get the ball thrown to him enough) to Buffalo (where the franchise is losing but hasn't burned down yet). All in all, quite a nice decade for the man known as T.O.

Dawkins was the only Eagle on the All-Decade team, starting at safety opposite Ed Reed:

It's probable that Troy Polamalu will go down in history as a better player, and it's tough not to have him on this team. But Dawkins has taken the field in 54 more games than Polamalu in the decade and produced in a big way every time he did. Not a premier cover player, but a vicious hitter with one of the best noses for the ball I've seen.

Note: Sean Morey also made the team as the special-teams ace, but he only played one season here.

Drew Rosehnaus' next-question press conference is No. 3 on Don Banks' list of signature moments:

Did any scene exemplify the decade of the diva receiver and all its accompanying nonsense quite like the November day in 2005 when Terrell Owens did sit-ups in the driveway of his Moorestown, N.J., home to the rapt attention of a media throng? With the Eagles having suspended Owens indefinitely for his public criticism of Donovan McNabb, Owens and his drama-loving agent, Drew Rosenhaus, held a press conference to issue an apology and ask for reinstatement. It quickly devolved into farce after T.O. read a short statement, with Rosenhaus pointedly ignoring tough questions, such as: "What have you done for T.O., besides get him kicked off the Eagles?''

Banks calls the T.O. trade to the Eagles the fourth-biggest of the decade:

You might forget that Owens blocked San Francisco's original deal with Baltimore, balking at the idea of joining the quarterback-challenged Ravens in the spring of 2004. Owens wanted to become an Eagle and play with Donovan McNabb, and he eventually got his wish when the three teams involved worked out a compromise that the league office helped broker. (The Eagles sent a fifth-round pick to Baltimore and defensive end Brandon Whiting to San Francisco. The Ravens also recovered a second-round pick that they sent to the Niners for Owens.) The deal was a bonanza for Philadelphia that season, as Owens' big-play impact got the Eagles finally over their NFC title game hump and into the Super Bowl. But by 2005, Owens and McNabb were at war, and the Eagles' season was a casualty of the conflict.