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January 14, 2006

Birds Post Mortem, Part Two

The coach, the legal department, and the Dirty Little Secret

So yeah, it was a pretty crappy year in terms of wins and losses. The blame, I think, sits mostly with the folks in charge. That is, management had a down year. Andy Reid has done wonders for Birds’ fans over the past couple years, but he really had a horrible year – people have been fired for much less. There was the complete mismanagement of the TO situation. There was the poor judgment in assembling the roster (looks like they could have used Corey Simon after all; and let us not even discuss the soon-to-be-out-of-football Mike McMahon, maybe the dumbest guy to play quarterback for the Birds in my adult life). There was also the completely stubborn playcalling (to the degree that you wonder how many years the 70-30 pass-to-run ratio may have taken off 5’s career) and the ongoing drama of the timeout-because-we-couldn’t-get-the-play-in-on-time.

In fact, f I had to pick a single feature of this season that I consistently found most disagreeable, it would be the Eagles’ stormy and borderline pathological relationship with the play clock. I found this absolutely infuriating, in a [sound of beer can impacting television] sort of way that typically only the ESPN Sunday Night Crew can draw out of me. (The mere thought of Joe Theismann trying to explain a first-quarter Eagles timeout as they cut to the shot of McMahon tapping the side of his helmet and shaking his head triggers involuntary teeth-grinding.)

I will argue that Mike Tice, the recently deposed coach of the Minnesota Vikings, had a much better year than Andy Reid. Let me note that I’ve always thought Tice to be completely overmatched by the complexities of being an NFL head coach and that it wasn’t an accident that he was the lowest-paid coach in the league. But it turns out he did a much better job this year than Andy Reid, in what turns out to be very similar circumstances. Instead of appeasing his idiot WR, he shipped him out of town. In terms of off-the-field controversy, Tice had to deal with his own misdeeds (Scalping your Super Bowl tickets? Dude, that’s awful.) as well as the Whizzinator incident and, of course, the sex boat scandal. And he lost his franchise quarterback to injury. And, in the midst of all that, as well as weekly speculation about his future, Tice got nine (9) wins out of the Vikings. Maybe their division was a little easier than the NFC East, but the Vikings at least came to play every week.

Outcoached by Mike Tice! I’m not even kidding! For shame, Andy Reid, for shame.

On the plus side, the legal department had a helluva year! They did a great job winning the arbitration against TO (you just can’t say enough about their ruthless documentation of all of his misdeeds), accusing the Cowboys of tampering (I thought that was delightfully sublime move, actually – f*ck the f*cking Cowboys) and generally having all the right components in place to screw over TO once he decided to try to destroy the team. If I could get an Eagles jersey with “Legal” on the back I might! At least they brought their A-game this year!

And now for the Dirty Little Secret:

The Birds were terrible this season on the field. Terrible. But this was the best Eagles season from a TV show perspective in a good long while. The Eagles made Sportscenter pretty much continuously from last February though this December. Not only was the reliably rabid Philly sports media all over the ongoing TO nonsense, but the ESPN fluff-machine descended on the Birds with a vengeance. We saw a lot of the NovaCare Center on Sportscenter. The NFL blathermonkeys brayed and bleated for ten whole months, guaranteeing that a story about the Birds made it onto PTI four days a week.

So if we posit that the NFL is an entertainment product, and it is, you really can't complain too much about this season. Sure, it's a lot more fun when the team wins AND is on Sportscenter every night (like 2004), but if you're going to be lousy, you can at least be lousy in a newsworthy way. And the Eagles were certainly that. Imagine being the Buffalo Bills or the Arizona Cardinals: you're crappy and no one cares. So in the absence of wins, we can at least take solace in the orgy of media attention the losses generated: losing with locker-room drama and unrest the team is a lot more interesting than losing with Bobby Hoying at quarterback.

That is, if you're going to lose, at least lose in an interesting and media-friendly way.

(I walked past the Linc tonight; dear God it pains me that I didn't get to watch a playoff game there this season. In conclusion, sigh.)

Posted by thatkid at January 14, 2006 5:50 PM under Philly , Sports

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