“Insanity [is] doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
- Albert Einstein
Another rollercoaster ride of an Eagles season has finally come to an inevitably disappointing end. In the weeks following the Birds’ depressing list of late season losses there is always that period where fans dwell on what went wrong, and this offseason is no different.
Five years from now we’ll look back on this Eagles team as a complete disappointment primarily because of the way the season ended; with two brutal losses at the hands of the hated Cowboys. The 2009 Eagles may have (at least statistically) been the most prolific offense in franchise history, but how much does that mean when most of the team’s success came against non-playoff teams?
You can blame injuries all you want…yes the losses of Stewart Bradley and Shawn Andrews devastated the team on both sides of the ball…but at the end of the day 2009 played out just like almost every other year of this past decade for the Eagles: great hope and promise ends in a horrific Hindenberg-esq catastrophe. As the sporting world looks on an NFC power inexplicably implodes in the blink of an eye and becomes a shadow of its former self as its leaders piss away timeouts, vomit on the field, take the blame, and look towards next year.
The Andy Reid-Donovan McNabb era may go down as one of the best in franchise history, but the two had their chances at greatness and squandered them each time. Now I stand before you saying that it is time to move on.
Big Red is befuddled. It's a look we've become all-too familiar with over the years.
First, the fate of the head coach: If I ran the Eagles Andy Reid would be fired tomorrow. This obviously isn’t likely to happen given the extension he recently signed, but hear me out here for a minute. Yes he did a terrific job building this team up from the wreck it was in the late 90’s/early 2000’s, but he has consistently shown an inability to take this team to the Promised Land.
Take the past two seasons as examples. In the NFC Championship Game last season the Eagles were clearly the better team than the Cardinals. Call me a sore loser all you want, but the Birds didn’t even show up for the first half of that game and STILL managed to take the lead late in the fourth quarter. What should have been a glorious triumph resulted in a close, brutal defeat thanks in large part to a team that was unprepared to play.
This season the Eagles came into their last two games against the Cowboys as one of the hottest teams in the conference. Two weeks later the Birds had humiliated their fans with two incredibly pathetic performances where they were not only out-played, but out-coached by a fat, bumbling “yes man” to Jerry Jones.
Any Eagles fan who has watched this team week after week needs no lecture on the horrendous game day management Andy Reid has become known for, or the huge holes he fails to address on the roster each season (remember the kick returner fiasco a few years back?!? Damn you Reno Mahe!) I understand he’s one of the winningest coaches of the decade, but that success hasn’t translated at all to the postseason. It’s time the Eagles shook things up and brought in a fresh face with a new voice.
What about #5? Donovan McNabb was not the only player to blame for those two embarrassing losses to Dallas, but every time the Eagles needed a leader to step up and play at a high level McNabb folded faster than you could say, “air guitar.”
If a team in desperate need of a QB offers a first and a third round pick for McNabb it’d be hard to say no, especially considering Donovan’s “advanced” age (at least by NFL standards.) Ideally though I’d hang on to him for at least one more season and let Kevin Kolb compete with him in camp for the starting spot. Keep the winner, and move the loser for picks. That being said the Eagles are supposedly extremely high on Kolb, so if they have no plans of giving McNabb an extension I wouldn’t at all be surprised if he is traded before the draft. Those picks could go a long way toward filling other holes on this roster.
Andy Reid and Donovan McNabb both deserve a lot of credit for resurrecting the Eagles from the doldrums of the late 90’s, but both have had the time and opportunity to bring a Super Bowl to Philly and failed. It’s time for a change on at least one of those two fronts to bring in a new perspective to get this team to the next level.
Our own Dany Sloan will have a pro-Reid/McNabb follow up later tonight.
