Rich Hofmann: Let's give Kolb a little credit

IT IS OFFICIALLY a circus now and, yesterday at Lincoln Financial Field, the calliope crashed to the ground.

Everybody played their accustomed part in the melodrama. Donovan McNabb won the big homecoming game on a day when he completed eight passes. Andy Reid took a bewildering romp through time-management hell. Michael Vick, running recklessly, trying to make a play near the goal line, had his chest caved in by a pair of Washington defenders. Kevin Kolb, child of scorn, got his job back, at least until they take it away again.

Other than that, nothing much happened.

We are past the point of scriptability. You cannot make this stuff up, not after Redskins 17, Eagles 12. There are few things about the Eagles that could surprise you any more this season - OK, other than maybe an in-season trade for Terrell Owens. Or McNabb. Other than that, though, not so much.

Now we wait on the MRI on Vick's chest, to see where Kolb stands.

"You want to be up there as much as possible and I'm a competitor and I want to play," Kolb said. "I want to win. It's vital for our season and for our team right now to go out and win next week and I hope I get the opportunity. But we'll see what happens with Mike's injury and what the situation is and then we'll go from there."

It goes without saying that this was a game the Eagles could have won. The time-management follies at the end of the first half potentially cost them four points. A Shady McCoy fumble at the Redskins' 21-yard line in the third quarter likely cost them at least three more. In the NFL, it is the loser's lament.

Kolb played a decent game, by the way - not a winning game, but a competent, professional, we-can-build-with-this-guy kind of game. (Which, way back when - you remember, last month - was what this season was supposed to be all about.) He played a Checkdown Charlie kind of style against a defense that dictated as much - which is what he was supposed to do.

Checkdown Charlie is a Brett Favre-ism, by the way. He famously derided quarterbacks who played that way on a conference call with Philadelphia reporters a couple of years ago - which people, including McNabb, took as a backhanded slap at McNabb's prudent style. Ah, memories.

Anyway, Kolb completed 63 percent of his passes, put almost all of the short ones where they needed to be put, and cut down a bit on the recklessness that marked his preconcussion play in the first half of the season opener against Green Bay.

But there were two shots down the field against Washington that Kolb needed to hit, and he hit on neither. One was a deep strike to DeSean Jackson with about 13 minutes left to play that he simply overthrew. The other was on the final play of the game, a Hail Mary to Jason Avant that rattled off Avant's normally sure hands and was intercepted on the rebound by Washington's DeAngelo Hall.

To repeat: a loser's lament.

"You always want to play," Kolb said. "Mike has been playing outstanding. The thing that I did today was, I didn't want to force anything. I didn't want to try to be overly aggressive and to learn from my mistakes that I made last time and take what the defense gave me. I feel like we did that as an offense.

"Again, I just feel like when a team is playing that style of defense, you can't make mistakes and the mistakes early costs us. I didn't feel like it was anything they did, I think we killed ourselves and the game would have been a lot different if we had done something earlier."

To be fair, let's make it a truthful assessment, please. If you want to say that Vick is a better player today - OK, yesterday, before he had his chest caved in - than Kolb is, that's fair. But can we please not pretend that the Eagles' offense crashed and burned against the Redskins simply because of the change in quarterback?

Fair is fair. And in the first quarter, when Vick was still in one piece, he completed five passes for 49 yards. One was a 31-yarder to McCoy that was all yards after the catch. The other completions were for 0, 7, 5 and 6 yards. Vick made no throws down the field because nobody was open down the field.

Same as Kolb.

Wideout Jeremy Maclin said the Redskins started in soft coverage with the two really deep safeties and they stuck with it. He said, "They wouldn't let anybody get behind them. [The safeties] were out of it - way out of it. You have to take what they give you."

Which is what Vick did.

Which is what Kolb did.

It was that kind of game both ways, to be honest. The Redskins had only two plays longer than 20 yards, and the Eagles had only one. The Eagles played it that way because of the Redskins' defense. The Redskins played it that way because of a decision to sit on their 14-point halftime lead, or because Washington coach Mike Shanahan didn't trust McNabb to throw it around. McNabb threw only 19 passes and completed only eight. The last time he played 60 minutes, completed only eight passes and still won the game was his first professional start, against the Redskins, in 1999.

A lot has changed since then. A lot has changed since September, for that matter. Kolb, though, has done a good job of keeping his head in his business.

"There have been some difficult times," he said. "I think if you know you're strong and you understand the situation, then you've got to just keep pressing on. That's what I've tried to do. I've been a backup long enough to know that you're really just one play away and that's the way you have to approach it."

Until the next quarterback decision by the head coach; that is, when Vick is again healthy and Reid takes the job away from Kolb for a second time. He should do that, by the way, given that he has proclaimed this a win-or-else year by elevating Vick in the first place. You can't go away from that now, can you?

Man, it is hard to believe this season is only 4 weeks old.

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