Email this postA bad Eagles weekend got worse today when Andy Reid, droning through the injuries in his usual day-after news conference, casually mentioned that Brian Westbrook has broken ribs. Two of 'em, Reid eventually acknowledged. He wouldn't speculate on Westbrook's availability for this weekend's game at San Francisco, but it would seem really unlikely that Westbrook will play, and even more unlikely that he will be effective.
Westbrook was the best player on the field on the Birds' opening drive Sunday against the Redskins, but suffered the rib injury on the eighth play of the game, Reid said, and though he left the game only briefly, he was not nearly as effective the rest of the way.
The rest of the news conference was Reid's usual mea culpa. He called the confused collapse on third and 1 from the Redskins' 2 late in the game "completely a coaching error on my part," and "unacceptable."
Reid repeatedly asserted that "the effort's there" with his 2-3 team, which seemed to be shaping up as one of the NFC's best before losing conference games the last two weeks.
Reid noted that the Eagles are "16 points off" in their three losses, even though they've actually lost those games by a total of 14 points. Somehow, the hazy math seemed fitting.
Les Bowen has covered the Eagles for the Daily News since 2002. Before that, he spent nearly 13 years covering the Flyers. It took Les only a few seasons after the switch to figure out that there was no penalty box at the Linc, and that the time really wasn't his, despite what Andy Reid kept saying. Les came to Philadelphia and the Daily News from Charlotte in 1983. In the intervening years, he has pretty much lost track of NASCAR, and his accent. He, his wife Barbara, and their two sons live in Haddon Township, New Jersey.
Paul Domowitch has been with the Daily News since 1982. He has spent most of his 26 years at the paper covering the Eagles and pro football. A native of Wilkes-Barre and a graduate of Wilkes University, where he spent 3 years as the sports editor of the school paper and zero semesters on the dean's list, Domo came to the Daily News from the Fort Worth (Tx.) Star-Telegram, where he covered some very bad Texas Ranger baseball teams. His first beat at the Daily News actually was boxing, which he covered just long enough to lose two sports coats to blood spatter before moving on to football. Domo and his wife Shelley, who is a University of Oklahoma grad and is dangerous to be around following a Sooner loss, have been married 27 years and have raised 2 terrific daughters – Allison, 23, who attends Boston University School of Law; and Amy, 21, a sports marketing major at Clemson. When he's not writing about football, Domo enjoys reading Robert Parker, John Sandford and Harlan Coben novels and playing pickup basketball when his arthritic hip doesn't object.
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