Birds stuck in the middle with a rook?

"Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, here I am, stuck in the middle with you."

 - Stealers Wheel, 1972

EVENTUALLY here, we are going to get to Casey Matthews and tonight's preseason game against Cleveland. First, though, a trip down memory lane.

One of the first stories I wrote when I took the Eagles beat for the Daily News in the spring of 2002 came from a phone conversation with middle linebacker Jeremiah Trotter, who had just been released after an acrimonious contract negotiation.

When the sides couldn't agree on compensation, the front office slapped Trot with the franchise tag, very much to his consternation. Finally, late one April Friday afternoon, the Eagles removed the tag and cut Trotter loose. Our phone conversation, several days later, had to do with something I'd heard - that Trot had gone down to NovaCare unannounced to confront Andy Reid, found that Andy wasn't there, and instigated a verbal altercation with team president Joe Banner, a dustup that led to Trotter's release.

Trot acknowledged the trip to NovaCare, acknowledged having been upset, disagreed with the "altercation" interpretation. Said he'd brought his minister in tow, just to keep him from getting too out of control. (I remember thinking that I'd covered the Flyers for 13 years, and nobody ever once did that.)

Whatever, the fulcrum of Jim Johnson's defense was leaving. Trotter ended up signing as a free agent with the Redskins, while Eagles sources implied he was overrated.

That first year on the beat, I experienced a phenomenon that was going to become very familiar. First, the Redskins did indeed end up being a little disappointed in Trot, even before he suffered a season-ending knee injury. Eagles management was right - he was not Ray Lewis, the Baltimore one-man gang whose salary Trotter envied.

But that, of course, was only part of the story. The rest was that the Eagles, who that year had what I believe to be the clearest shot at winning the Super Bowl of any of Reid's five teams that have made it to the NFC Championship Game, tried to do it without a decent middle linebacker, and could not.

First regular-season Eagles game I covered was the opener that year in Tennessee. Still remember watching through the binoculars as Eddie George cut back against 300-plus-pound Levon "Big Daddy" Kirkland, who had signed with the Eagles right before camp.

Big Daddy looked like an ocean liner trying to turn around. Did not make the tackle.

Four months later and much less humorously, Barry Gardner, the overmatched 1999 second-round pick who split the middle-linebacking job with Kirkland that year, ended up trailing Joe Jurevicius across the middle, unable to catch up on the pass play that turned around the NFC title game.

The Eagles didn't really have a good middle linebacker again until Trot returned, after begging Reid to take him back, in 2004. Even then, Trotter played special teams for half the year, sitting behind undersized Mark Simoneau, before Johnson saw fit to make him the starter. Trot's play down the stretch in '04 had a lot to do with the Eagles making it to the Super Bowl for the only time in Reid's tenure. The team brought him back as an afterthought, and got very lucky.

When it comes to middle-linebacking, Trot seems to be the only good idea the Birds ever had, and he is done now, as he proved conclusively during his desperate third stint with the team, in 2009.

This is my 10th year covering the Eagles, and I still have no idea what they really want from their middle linebackers, no idea how they really view the rookie, Matthews. Reid got huffy with reporters after last Thursday's hideous loss at Pittsburgh, in which the fourth-round pick from Oregon looked completely lost, at least to those of us who lack the Eagles' nuanced powers of observation. Apparently, much like Simoneau, who always graded out well in film study, Matthews was usually where he was supposed to be, even if he NEVER MADE ANY PLAYS.

A year ago, what the Eagles wanted in a middle linebacker was Stew Bradley. Bradley was big and fast and had shown great promise in 2008 before losing 2009 to a knee injury, the crisis that led to dusting off Trotter for a reunion tour. Bradley was a disappointment last year; he seemed much less instinctive than he had been in '08. But on a defense that had a lot of problems, he was at least functional. You hoped that another year removed from his knee injury, Bradley might get back some of his mojo.

He never got the chance. The Eagles placed a second-round tender on Bradley early in the offseason, then when it became clear he was going to be an unrestricted free agent, they lost interest. The guarantee Bradley eventually got from Arizona - in the neighborhood of $10 million - might have had a lot to do with that.

From Trotter in 2002 to today, one thing about the Eagles and middle linebackers is clear - they have their positions they are willing to pay for (cornerback, left tackle, quarterback, defensive end). MIKE is not among them. They will take their chances this year, maybe with a 2011 version of Kirkland after cutdowns (or via trade, if they absolutely are forced). Maybe they'll even try it with Matthews, who acknowledged again this week that he was shocked when he lined up in the defense for the first time ever 4 weeks ago not as an understudy but as the starter.

Tonight, everybody in Lincoln Financial Field is going to be watching Matthews, and if the defense gets gashed again, the rookie surely is going to hear about it.

Is Bradley really worth what the Cards gave him? Almost certainly not. But are the Eagles really better off with Matthews/player to be named in the middle? Seems like we've asked these questions before.

"Trying to make some sense of it all, but I can see that it makes no sense at all."

 - Stealers Wheel, 1972.