Eagles survive Vick's four-pick game

CLEVELAND - Michael Vick tied the black do-rag behind his neck, parked the white headphones on his forehead, and grasped the handle of his rolling carry-on. The Eagles quarterback was more than ready to leave Cleveland Browns Stadium Sunday evening, with this lesson, at least, learned:

"I'll never take preseason for granted again," Vick said, with a weary shake of his head. "Need that work."

If the Eagles are going to have a decent season, you have to hope that was the root of the problem Sunday, those much-discussed dozen snaps Vick recorded in a pair of preseason games, before exiting with an injury each time. Vick did not leave Sunday's season-opening, 17-16 victory over the lightly regarded Cleveland Browns, even for a snap. Early in the fourth quarter, there were people yelling at screens across the Philadelphia region, begging for Vick to leave in favor of rookie quarterback Nick Foles.

Or veteran quarterback Trent Edwards. Anybody, really.

Vick's slow-motion, out-of-sync, four-interception performance against a rookie quarterback making his first NFL start nearly gave away an opener the Eagles were favored to win by more than a touchdown; it was enough to make one pine for the Donovan McNabb era. Well, almost.

"I gotta get out of Cleveland," Vick said during his postgame presser. "I gotta get out of Cleveland."

In retrospect, the fact that the Browns were second in the NFL against the pass last season, and that Vick didn't get much game-related work on anything other than X-rays in the preseason - these things mattered more than most of us ever thought they would. The Browns were a minute and 18 seconds away from winning a game in which they hadn't scored an offensive touchdown, a game quarterback Brandon Weeden would finish with a 5.1 passer rating, when Vick hit tight end Clay Harbor with a 4-yard touchdown pass. Alex Henery's extra point gave the Eagles the lead for good.

Defensive tackle Cullen Jenkins was asked if he thought the Eagles dodged a bullet.

"We dodged a bazooka," Jenkins said.

Vick's fourth interception was the worst of the bunch. On the series after his third pick produced a Cleveland field goal that pulled the Browns within 10-9, Vick tried to throw the ball through double coverage to Jeremy Maclin, who was targeted a stunning 14 times, catching seven passes for 96 yards and a TD. This time, the pass hit middle linebacker D'Qwell Jackson in the chest, and he ran it in 27 yards for a touchdown.

"I thought he was rusty," Eagles coach Andy Reid said of Vick, in the understated manner of a man who might have described nearby Lake Erie as looking wet.

Reid was asked if he considered, even for an instant, sending in Foles in the fourth quarter to try to win a game the Eagles dominated in yardage (456-210) and first downs (25-12).

"I thought he had to work through it," Reid said. "He's our quarterback. You've got to do that. The game's fast. It picks up even off the preseason, and he didn't have any preseason . . . This was an important game for him to get in and play and endure and toughen it out, which he did."

That was the spin afterward, that the Eagles hung in there, avoiding despair or finger-pointing through an incredibly frustrating game, a game their defense dominated. The Eagles picked off Weeden four times, two apiece by Dominique Rodgers-Cromartie and Kurt Coleman, including Coleman's game-sealer with 1:05 left.

Jenkins noted afterward what he'd said during the week, that the main thing you can tell from a season opener is "the fight, how you react to adversity. We handled it well, for it to be the first game. There's no question there's a lot of fight in this team."

They'll need more than fight next week against the Baltimore Ravens, though.

"We've got a lot of things we've got to take care of," said Reid, whose team was penalized a dozen times for 110 yards.

Disaster seemed to lurk on almost every snap during the Eagles' 16-play, 91-yard drive for the winning points. The snap before the TD pass was a heave toward Maclin in the end zone that was deflected away by rookie linebacker L.J. Fort. Nobody in Philadelphia would have been at all surprised if Fort had pulled it in for the finishing blow.

Five plays before that, Vick stuffed all that sunny offseason talk of injury avoidance into the trash and lowered his helmet at the end of a 9-yard run on third-and-10, taking a hard hit and fumbling, before falling on the ball. The ball eventually was wrestled away from Vick, and Cleveland coach Pat Shurmur challenged the recovery, but the Eagles kept the ball with 3:01 left.

LeSean McCoy then gained the most important 3 of his 110 yards (on 20 carries), converting fourth-and-1 from the 23. Five plays later, Harbor was celebrating.

Harbor said it was the same play the Eagles used for a touchdown in the preseason win over the Patriots.

"Two tight ends on the left, we call it a West formation; I'm off the ball, Brent [Celek]'s off the ball. Brent outside releases, and if the linebacker over us goes with him, [as] he runs a 10-yard in, I'm going to have one-on-one with the middle linebacker," Harbor said. "D'Qwell was there. He was a little deep, so I tried to cross his face, and as soon as I looked back, Mike put the ball in a perfect spot."

That didn't happen too often. Vick's offensive line talked all week about letting him settle in, giving him time to get comfortable, but the Browns were pressuring from everywhere. Left tackle King Dunlap had an especially rough time in the early going, though he seemed to get straightened out in the second half. Vick's reads obviously were not up to regular-season speed; though critics will say the four picks evoked last year's mistake-prone QB, he really looked more like the 2009 Vick, fresh from prison and two clicks slow on everything.

"Absolutely," Vick said, when asked about feeling relieved. "I would be lying if I said it wasn't [a feeling of relief]."

Left guard Evan Mathis said: "To sum Michael Vick up today was just pure persistence. He just kept going."

With four coaches who have served time with the Eagles and six former Eagles players on their roster, the Browns seemed abnormally well-versed on tendencies. They jumped routes and found holes in protection schemes.

"I thought Dick Jauron called a heckuva game," Reid said of the Browns' defensive coordinator, who 2 years ago coached Eagles defensive backs.

Reid and offensive coordinator Marty Mornhinweg did not. Though the Browns are not nearly as good at stopping the run as the pass, the offense went away from McCoy after the early fumble and three long early runs that were all called back by penalties.

Reid said he and Mornhinweg thought there were things they could exploit in the Browns' coverages, as they did on the final drive of the first half, when back-to-back throws to Maclin accounted for 64 yards and a touchdown. They obviously were counting on a much sharper Vick, and the late first-half TD must have had them thinking he had shaken off the rust. Instead, Vick was about as bad as you could be in the third quarter and the early fourth.

But the offense finally found some rhythm on the drive before the winning touchdown, when the Eagles pieced together 10 plays for 53 yards, six of them runs, five by McCoy for 42 yards.

"That calms the defense down, calms the crowd down," McCoy noted.

Though Alex Henery then added to the frustration by missing a 45-yard field goal, at least Vick had run 10 plays without giving the ball away, and he was able to build on that.

"We're not leaving this game thinking we dominated by any stretch of the imagination," Mathis said. "We'll get in the film room, look at our mistakes and learn from 'em."

The Eagles have won four of their last five openers; Andy Reid lost six of his first nine before that . . . Cornerback Curtis Marsh (hamstring) was the only reported Eagles injury.