TRUSTS CHOOCH IN A PINCH
This article was originally published in the Inquirer on September 9, 2004.
Once again, like a patient parent, Andy Reid isn't making any promises about the coming football season. So stop asking.
"We'll see," Reid says.
He says that mostly in answer to the flyspeck questions that often seem to obscure the windshield here. Will so-and-so be happy if he only touches the ball this many times? Will so-and-so be able to adjust to a new position? Will so-and-so be able to come back from his foot/knee/shoulder/hand injury well enough to start/contribute/dress/practice in time for this week/next month/the playoffs/his Hall of Fame induction?
"We'll see. "
It is true enough. We will see.
What we have seen so far from Reid and the organization he put into place should be enough to forestall many of the little questions. Players will play and, if they can't or don't, other players will play. Reid and his staff will choose them, and, to this point, it is hard to argue with their decisions.
Making the NFL equivalent of the Final Four three years in a row is an amazing accomplishment. Winning 10 or more games four straight seasons might be even tougher, considering that the life cycle of true contenders in the league today is as short as a free agent's attention span.
How many other NFL teams are riding a four-year streak of winning at least 10 games? None. That's how hard it is. (If you want to consider a really difficult task, go back to the glory days of the San Francisco 49ers. With the exception of 1982, when a strike shortened the season to nine games, the Niners won 10 or more every season from 1981 to 1998. That is not only a testament to a great organization - and a good reason Reid and the other West Coasters got so many head coaching jobs - but says something about the relative merits of the Atlanta Falcons and New Orleans Saints during most of that period, too. )
With the Eagles, this is a season for larger not smaller questions, even though the answers will still be the same.
Nothing lasts, after all, and the Eagles appear to balance on a tenuous ledge. They added showy free agents Terrell Owens and Jevon Kearse, but the defections were immense - particularly since the Eagles chose not to keep Troy Vincent, Bobby Taylor and Duce Staley. It was such a strange and jumbled off-season that scorned linebacker Jeremiah Trotter returned to the team, and no one seemed to think that was terribly out of the ordinary.
Reid departed from some of his past practices, to be sure, if only in the way they were perceived from the outside. Maybe an attention-seeking missile like Owens would have been welcomed four years ago, too, but that never seemed to be the kind of locker room Reid was interested in constructing then. Trotter's one-way ticket out of town turned out to have a return stub, which would have been difficult to predict as well.
If Reid is changing things up, there is probably a very good reason. It could be that he hears the clock ticking on the team's successful streak and knows that the unavoidable gaps caused by the loss of his aging former stars have not been fully filled by their replacements.
The defensive backfield today is not as good as the defensive backfield a year ago, for instance. That's an opinion, but it is a reasonable one. The running back position is not as good today as it was a year ago. The defensive line and the receivers appear to be better. The quarterback is the quarterback. He's going to make some great plays and throw the ball into the ground, too. The offensive line and the linebackers? Those could go either way. Special teams? Who knows?
It is just a feeling, and those are worth exactly nothing after the opening kickoff against the Giants, but this feels like a team that doesn't know whether it is very good or not, either. The preseason was muddled by injuries and inconsistent performances. Not having Brian Dawkins was costly. Losing Correll Buckhalter was significant, if only because he protected Brian Westbrook from overuse.
This could actually be an uncertain regular season and an interesting playoff season, which is the opposite of what Reid's Eagles have provided so far. One of the largest of the large questions is how a team that can be so methodical for 16 weeks, wearing down opponents with the great weight of probability and outcome, can be so disappointing in the biggest games at the end.
If the playoff rounds were each best-of-seven series, the Eagles would have won a couple of Super Bowls by now. Give Reid and his staff enough chances and enough film, and they will beat you. But they have been unable to survive in the one-and-done world where the better team doesn't always win.
This season, with an offense that should be capable of quick-strike lightning and a young defense that will swing the games one way or the other, the Eagles are better suited for rolling the dice in the Final Four.
Getting that far will be the true crapshoot, however. Will they?
We'll see.
