Eagles QB Kolb looking to establish more rhythm

BETHLEHEM - The quarterback headed toward his Chevy truck with the Texas license plate, parked behind the Lehigh field house.

Ask Kevin Kolb what he learned after the 3 1/2-week, 36-practice training camp, and there's no hesitation in his voice.

"The biggest thing I found out in this team is everybody pulls each other up," Kolb said. "It's not one guy. It's not somebody feeling pressure. When somebody feels it, boom, somebody pulls the next guy along, and that's what you want with a team. That's how you become the best, and we have that with everybody here."

Year 1 at Lehigh with Kolb as the starting quarterback ended yesterday with a light practice closed to the public. Even the media was asked to stay off the sidelines. But amid a mad postpractice scramble to shower and hit the road for the NovaCare Complex, where training camp resumes today, Kolb said he accomplished exactly what he wanted at camp.

"It's been a very successful camp, especially the last week, 6, 7 days have been very good," Kolb said. "We just want to keep moving forward. We just want to take it one step at a time, and our next step is going to Cincinnati [for tomorrow's preseason game] and getting on the road and proving ourselves on the road, playing against a pretty good defense and trying to put the whole package together."

Atop the objective list for the game against the Bengals is red-zone improvement, by far the first-team offense's biggest problem in a no-touchdown performance last week against the Jaguars.

Kolb, along with coach Andy Reid, expects to see improvement there, in part because of Kolb's knack for learning from his past mistakes.

Whenever his camp performance was underwhelming - poor throws, interceptions, wrong reads - Reid and offensive coordinator Marty Mornhinweg praised the quarterback for next-day adjustments and not letting mistakes become habit.

"It was going through a couple bad practices and then pulling back up into the good ones," Kolb said about what he most took away from his time at Lehigh. "Don't let it linger too hard. Don't beat yourself up over it. Just be able to forget about it, move forward and forget about it the next day."

Kolb wants to establish more rhythm at Cincinnati after taking only took 25 snaps against Jacksonville. Every rep and game from now until the regular-season opener is one more level up, he said.

His feeling driving back to Philadelphia? Moving in the right direction, but still a ways to go. And the man driving the truck - and the Eagles offense - is on that same course, his coach said.

"He showed that he's very capable of doing this thing," Reid said. "It's way more stress than he's ever had on his arm or asked to do from a throwing standpoint. I thought he did a very good job with that, and then his command and intangible part of it, he maintained what we thought he would do and what he did last year."