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Dana Pennett O'Neil | Despite troubles, Birds stick together
But the Eagles counter they aren't admitting
disaster because they still see a glimmer of hope. They counter with the 2006 season, an oft-mentioned revival these days.
Labeled roadkill after Donovan McNabb blew out his knee, the Eagles
instead circled the
Escalades and wound up in the playoffs while their rivals up the turnpike
imploded amid their
infighting.
"We've been here before," Quintin Mikell said. "That's what we keep saying and that's the truth. Last year, everyone had written us off but it's crazy. Anything can happen in the NFL. We know we're a good team and we know the games we lost, we lost
in this locker room. Even though you look at the score of the games, we made mistakes. It's not like they whupped our tails. We made mistakes that helped them out."
The irrational among us, of course, want the quarterback benched, the coach fired and the answers to be found yesterday. But a day after McNabb did a poor job in conveying his portion of culpability - he didn't say he wasn't at fault, for the record. He just did a lousy job in explaining why he's simply part of the problem - the quarterback has the support of his teammates.
"If the rest of us were playing great and it was one guy all the time, we'd get on that one guy," Sheldon Brown said. "Donovan? People you know are going to do that because they drafted another quarterback and because of who he is. If you make all that money, you stand up there on the podium when we win an NFC championship and you get the credit for the Super Bowl, you've got to be willing to take the good with the bad. We know how it goes."
Ditto the coach.
Lambasted by a judge and now the subject of national scrutiny as both his team and his family life appear to be in a shambles, with people begging him to react or at least emote, Reid is actually being lauded for his flatline approach by his players.
"We can't ride the roller coaster," Mikell said. "If you do that, that's when you have guys pointing at each other,
giving up on plays and not giving their all.
"I really think it starts with the head coach. He doesn't get too up or too down. If you make a mistake, he'll let you know. But he doesn't come over and curse you out and that's something that filters down to the team. It helps in times like this, when it feels like everybody is against us."
The real issue is, this is all pretty new. Eagle-dom has long been spared the feeling of a listing ship, so it's understandable that quite a few people are interpreting a slow roll as an all-out Titanic.
But take it from someone who knows, says Smith. A Rutgers player back when Rutgers was the walkover game of the week, the tight end has been on a few sinking ships. He recognizes the swaying well.
He doesn't see it here, not yet.
Nor does he see anyone ready to call out anyone else.
