Now What?

Trying to make sense, any sense at all, of the 2008 Eagles

by E. James Beale

Photo By: Michael T. Regan

Four weeks ago, the Andy Reid/Donovan McNabb era unofficially ended. Coming off an ugly tie with a Cincinnati Bengals team whose fans were organizing protests against its owners, the Eagles fell to the Baltimore Ravens 36-7 in a game that was every bit as brutal as the score suggests. After star quarterback McNabb threw two interceptions and lost a fumble in the first half — giving him a whopping seven turnovers in his last seven quarters — head coach Reid benched the face of his franchise for the first time in McNabb's professional career. The man he inserted to replace him, second-year backup Kevin Kolb, had never been tested, and was now facing a top-ranked NFL defense, on the road, down just three points. McNabb watched from the sidelines, head and arms hidden in a parka, glancing out at M&T Bank Stadium's frozen field like an oversize 12-year-old waiting outside the principal's office, trying and failing to fade into the walls. His understudy didn't rise to the challenge: Kolb turned the ball over two more times and completed just 10 of his 23 attempts.

After the game, McNabb was asked for his response to the benching, and said his first reaction was, "wow." Reid was non-committal about who would be the Eagles' quarterback moving forward.

Naturally, the media sank in their teeth: Inquirer columnist Ashley Fox declared McNabb's tenure in Philadelphia "over." "Let it be," she wrote. Peter King, Sports Illustrated's senior football writer, went so far as to says he hoped another team would give No. 5 a shot. Nor did the critics stop with the QB. Mike Lombardi, a former NFL general manager and current National Football Post analyst, opined that "Reid as the general manager is not working." NFL Network analyst Warren Sapp took the same thought one step further: "I think it's pretty obvious," he said. "Fire the coach. ... Andy Reid is not going to bring a championship to Philadelphia.''

Fans agreed. In bars and around water coolers in Philadelphia, the discussion quickly turned from playoff prospects — Sports Illustrated had picked the Birds to go to the Super Bowl — to the next head coach: Would they lure Bill Cowher out of retirement? Could they persuade Giants defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo to return to Philly, where he once coached?

When Andy Reid was first introduced as head coach, much was made of his five-year plan to lead the Eagles to glory. Now, 10 years later, it seemed that the team, the league and the sport had left him behind.

Then a strange thing happened. Just four days after that Baltimore loss, the Eagles throttled the NFC West-leading Arizona Cardinals. Ten days later they delivered a shot to the thigh of the New York football Giants, then considered the best team in football, and a week after that they cruised past Cleveland on Monday Night. They not only looked like a playoff team, but were two wins away from actually being one.

Until this weekend, that is, when the Eagles came up a half-yard short against the Redskins. Heading into Sunday's game against the Dallas Cowboys, the home team is 8-6-1 and, while improbably alive for the playoffs, would need help to get there.

What the hell is going on?

Whether you were the hardest of haters or the most loyal of homers, if you stuck to your guns this season, at some point you were right. The Eagles have been awful, and the Eagles have been awesome. Now, with a possibly important, possibly meaningless Dallas game approaching, it seems right to ask: Which are the Eagles really? A good team that's made mistakes, or a mediocre team that's teased us? And were we premature in dismissing Andy Reid? Or is an undeserving coach about to duck the firing squad once more?

The Eagles are Good

Photo By: Michael T. Regan JUST OUT OF REACH: Like his final pass of Sunday's game, McNabb and the Eagles are so close but so far from the playoffs heading into the season's finale.

There were a number of conventional-wisdom explanations offered for the Eagles' late-season winning streak. Some said Brian Westbrook finally got healthy. Others believed Reid's benching of McNabb galvanized the team.

What actually changed may be simpler: nothing. As Aaron Schatz, creator of footballoutsiders.com and contributor to the annual Football Prospectus handbook, explains: "McNabb happened to have a couple of bad games there in November, but he's mostly had a good season. The defense has been good all season."

Sure, the Cincinnati tie was shameful, but there's a reason that "Any Given Sunday" is a horribly overused cliché: In the NFL, every team (save maybe the Lions) is capable of anything. In the Eagles' own NFC East, the division widely considered the most formidable in football, the Giants fell to the lowly Browns and were taken to overtime by Cincinnati. Dallas was trounced by terrible St. Louis, as was Washington, which also lost outright to that problematic Bengals team. Over the course of a 16-game regular season, damn near every team in the NFL plays bad games. This year, the Eagles' bad games came in consecutive weeks, and that made them seem worse than they were.

Their problem, and it's not a trivial one, is that they looked awful. Aesthetically, the Birds just don't inspire confidence. Not only do they struggle in short yardage situations, but Reid is a notoriously bad challenger. The sight of him tossing a red flag on an unchallengeable play can dishearten even his staunchest supporters. McNabb, too, fails to project an image of athletic dominance. When the QB takes the stage for a midweek press conference, he approaches the podium with his sweatshirt tucked into sweat pants, and a pair of Eagles-green Crocs. If he weren't the quarterback, he'd fit in fine at a Lehigh Valley den, drinking cheap beers, complaining about the quarterback.

HALF OFF DEPOT

Why live life at full price?

But the visual cloaks something else: the talent and preparation that make McNabb really fucking good. It's a frequent message-board complaint that McNabb puts too many balls at the feet of his receivers, but equally remarkable is his extraordinarily low rate of interception. So no, this coach and this QB don't strike you as golden boy Tom Brady and evil genius Bill Belichick. But it's worth noting that Reid and Belichick have virtually identical winning percentages, and that McNabb has actually been to more Pro Bowls than Brady.

The "Eagles-are-done" talk should also probably have been mitigated by recent history. Over the course of the Andy Reid era, the Eagles have a December record of 29-15 (including four regular season games in January). If you take out the last two games of 2004, when Reid pulled the entire team after the first seed was locked up — the Birds' leading rusher in the last game of that season was a guy named Eric McCoo, playing the first and last game of his NFL career — their winning percentage is an astounding 69 percent. The Eagles always manage to put it together toward the end of the year.

That stat, more than most, has to be attributed to the head coach. It's easy to forget after watching his on-field play calling, but Reid really is smart. He fixes mistakes and knows how to motivate his players. Whether or not you agree with it, the decision to bench McNabb for the second half of the Baltimore game succeeded in inspiring the troops. "We weren't going to allow him take the fall by himself," declared All-Pro safety Brian Dawkins after the benching.

Even in this weekend's loss to Washington, when the Eagles played as poorly as they can play — their receivers dropped seven passes, including a sure touchdown by rookie DeSean Jackson — the Birds fell just a half a yard short of sending the game to overtime. And the Redskins are not a bad team.

How did the Eagles turn it around? Maybe they didn't. Maybe they were always pretty good.

No, Wait, the Eagles stink

There is, of course, another possibility. Maybe the Eagles have just always been kinda bad.

Look back on the Birds' recent streak: The Thanksgiving day Arizona game was actually a win against a West Coast team that can't beat anyone outside its division (6-0 in the NFC West, 2-7 out of it), traveling east on three days' rest. The Giants are a different team without suspended wideout Plaxico Burress (the Eagles double-teamed Plax on 73 percent of his plays in their first matchup; in the rematch, they double-teamed his replacement on just four of 51 snaps). And from there, things got easier: The Cleveland Browns, whom the Birds faced last Monday night, haven't scored an offensive touchdown in five weeks. Simply put, the hot streak could have easily been the product of a decent team playing bad competition. Hence the loss to Washington.

A turn of luck may also have been a factor in the now-a-distant-memory winning streak. Consider the Birds' otherworldly third-down conversion rate in the wins. Yes, third-down conversions are somewhat dependent on controllable factors, but statistically, teams that outperform their normal down averages on third down come back to Earth. Over the last month, the Eagles drastically outperformed their first- and second-down averages on third down. In fact, from the middle of 1994 through late in the 2008 season — a span of 247 games — the Eagles converted 10 or more third downs in a game exactly three times, or once every five years. They then converted 10 or more three times in a row before the Washington game. In D.C. they converted just three of 14.

Also, about those midseason adjustments? It's true that Reid's teams get better as the season progresses. But that's not necessarily because Reid's a good coach. The Eagles may well improve in December because, systemically, Reid is a poor one.

The Reid-era Birds are, in many ways, defined by two traits: They love throwing the ball and they're fantastic late in the season. These two points are constantly harped upon, but rarely, if ever, coupled. That's crazy. The reason the Birds are so successful late may be because it's cold, and so the coach is forced to throw less.

Obviously this theory isn't perfect: There are plenty of cold games in November and at least nominally warm games in December, as well as dome games and games in warm climates. But think about it: Cold weather forces the Eagles to play more ball-control offense, which means offensive balance — the Eagles have just five 300-yard passing performances over the last 10 Decembers, compared to nine 100-yard rushing ones.

This matters. Since the 2000 season, the Eagles are 54-10 in games in which they have more rushing attempts than their opponents and just 35-40-1 when they have less. In their three most recent wins they out-carried their opponents by 30, 18 and 13 attempts. On Sunday, they ran half as many times as the Skins.

Maybe the Eagles aren't better late in the season because they're smarter or more motivated; maybe they're better because Andy Reid is forced to be reasonable. And that's a team flaw. As long as Reid is the coach of this team, we can expect the play-calling to be terribly imbalanced — and for the Eagles, as a result, to sometimes come up a half-yard short.

What's changed for the Eagles? Again, the answer may be nothing — but the reality may not be that the Birds were always pretty good. It may be that they never were.

The Reid Conundrum

Photo By: Michael T. Regan DECEMBER MASTERMIND? Do the Eagles excel late in the season because Coach Reid is smart, or because he isn't?

Andy Reid was a good thing for the Philadelphia Eagles. His five-year plan restored the team to national prominence, and brought it to the brink of a championship. Since then? The team has a combined record of 32-30-1 — a .500 team.

These days, when Coach Reid is asked about a particular player's role in an upcoming contest, he tends to say something along the lines of, "we'll see how the game goes." This sounds, at first, like a stock answer to avoid giving away strategy. But after spending some time with the team, I'm not so sure. Game to game, play to play, the roster doesn't know what to expect. At 12:55 on the day of a 1 p.m. game, I'm honestly not confident that Brian Westbrook has a clear idea of what kind of workload he'll have. Over the last four weeks, he's carried the ball 22, 33, 16 and 12 times.

My request to interview Coach Reid was initially accepted, then turned down by the Eagles' PR department. I would have liked to ask him about his long-term goals, now that his five-year plan is ancient history. I was told, when I pitched this, that Reid doesn't like to think beyond next week's game. But it actually seems like the guy who used to think two, three, four years ahead doesn't know what he's planning two, three, four plays from now. On Sunday, from midway through the third quarter until the Eagles' final drive, the Birds ran 16 consecutive pass plays — a series that, taken as a set, appeared almost impossibly shortsighted. If you tried it in Madden, your opponent would accuse you of giving up.

Are these Eagles the talented group that can catch fire and make a run through the playoffs, or a mediocre team that needs to catch breaks to win? The answer is yes. In the immortal words of Dennis Green, the Eagles are who you thought they were — almost regardless of what you thought. They have wins over the Giants and Steelers (the two teams with the best Vegas odds of winning the Super Bowl), but also put up three points in a must-win. They have the ability, with the right breaks, to win 10 games, but also the flaws to lose 10. The problem is their direction: They don't have one. The Eagles are a middle-of-the-road team that's just good enough not to change. Next season, like this one, we'll think they're headed to the Super Bowl, and we'll think they're set to blow it up. In all likelihood, neither will happen.

E. James Beale blogs obsessively at citypaper.net/sports.