The 'D' Stands For ...

... Doesn'tmakeadifference.

As much maligned as Jeff Lurie's "Things were terrible; I'm not changing anything" remarks were a couple weeks ago, this is one time where he's in close alignment with at least a sizable minority of the paying customers.

Ask any Eagles fan if promoting Juan Castillo to DC was the right move last year and it's unlikely you'll hear the word 'yes.'  And yet somehow one-quarter of our brethren still think Castillo deserves a second chance!

I don't really take this number at face value.  Too many of the explanations I've heard for why we should keep Castillo start by blaming Andy Reid for hiring him in the first place, as if what matters here is ensuring Reid pays for his long litany of (supposed) sins and not finding the best possible person to coach the Eagles' defense next year.

This is, of course, moronic, but also the logical next step in the long line of "If we just get rid of him, everything will be better" arguments we've heard for about the last decade.

At any rate, I'm not really here to talk about Juan Castillo (which avoids rendering the last paragaph intolerably ironic), but rather a subject near and dear to my heart:  DVOA, and the misapplications thereof.

Let's start by stipulating that DVOA does all the things a good stat should do.  It's descriptive and predictive, gives us a common metric for measuring teams against each other, and boy does it help resolve a lot of arguments.

To the extent DVOA has problems, it's not because of anything the FO guys do.  Look at last week's FO NFC Championship game preview. There are many words and arguments in that thing, but not once will you find the sentence:

"And of course San Francisco will win because it has a higher DVOA."

Such a statement would be absurd on its face (and would also make people wonder why they're paying for FO's "advanced picks" each week when they could just look up two numbers in a freely available table and get the same answers.

So let's emphatically state that this isn't an FO problem.

But boy, is FO starting to cause some problems. And the biggest, I think, stems from a near universal misunderstanding of what the "D" in DVOA means.  Start with their definition:

Once we have all our adjustments, we can find the difference between this player's success and the expected success of an average running back in the same situation (or between this defense and the average defense in the same situation, etc.). Add up every play by a certain team or player, divide by the total baseline for success in all those situations, and you get VOA, or Value Over Average.Of course, the biggest variable in football is the fact that each team plays a different schedule.

By adjusting each play based on the defense's average success in stopping that type of play over the course of a season, we get DVOA, or Defense-adjusted Value Over Average. Rushing and passing plays are adjusted based on down and location on the field; receiving plays are also adjusted based on how the defense performs against passes to running backs, tight ends, and wide receivers. Defenses are adjusted based on the average success of the offenses they are facing. (Yes, this is still called DVOA, for the sake of simplicity.)

Sounds pretty simple, right?  VOA is a measure of how well a team has played and DVOA corrects for opponents, so you can throw out any concerns about strength of schedule and say things like "DVOA proves the Eagles have the league's twelfth-best defense, even if you claim they didn't play very many teams that were any good."

Except you can't.  DVOA says nothing of the kind, as we can best demonstrate with a couple of charts.  Here's the first one, plotting this season's DVOAs against VOAs:

Yes, that looks pretty much exactly the way two data series with a correlation coefficient of .985 should look when plotted next to each other.  Here's schedule strength (based on DVOA) vs. DVOA:

That one's messier, but there's a clearly identifiable down trend (correlation = -.660).  If the opponent adjustments actually worked the way people thought they did -- and which I thought they did until not that long ago -- the correlation here would be much closer to zero.*  

Again, none of this is meant as a criticism of Football Outsiders.  They're trying to create the most predictively successful stats possible and they appear to have settled on minimal opponent adjustments as the way to do that.

It's easy to see why making bigger adjustments would be tough.  NFL teams play better at different times for a wide variety of reasons (injuries, scheme adjustments, new coaches, etc.).  Given the small sample sizes involved, it's practically impossible to start saying things like, "Well, Trent Cole was out that week, so we should bump the ASR, but oh wait, so was their LG, so we need to factor that in too."

What this means, though, is that it's time to stop hand-waving away posts like this one from Brian Solomon with the explanation "Oh, DVOA takes care of all that stuff."  No, it doesn't, and if you still don't believe that, I've got some Stephen McGee futures contracts to sell you.

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* Note:  The strength of schedule effect is weaker in previous seasons.  The DVOA/VOA correlation stays in the .97-.98 range, however.

If Rocky Had Been The Favorite

It's been 13 years since I lived anywhere close to Philadelphia, and yet I still speak fluently the language of booing.

This sets me apart from the tens of millions of sports fans who don't have Philadelphia in their blood and so hear booing as an undifferentiated cacophony of sound, similar to the way a monolingual English speaker would experience market morning in a remote Tibetan village.

The locals sure seem angry about something, but it's not clear what it is.

The most puzzling thing about yesterday's game wasn't the result.  We lost this game the day Andy Reid hired Juan Castillo.  Being down a quarterback, wide receiver, and two of our top three cornerbacks against a team that requires you to a) score a lot and b) play a flag football defense just made the final result worse.

No, what was strange about yesterday was how conflicted the crowd seemed about booing a series of decisions, mistakes and displays of cowardice that should have whipped those attending into a frothing rage. The relative quiescence was strange and surprising.

This matters because if you want to gauge the feelings of the team's most important fans -- the ones who plunk down their hard-earned cash each season for tickets and then optimistically gear up for an impending bloodletting on a holiday weekend -- then you can blow off the commenting cesspool at philly.com, the can-you-top-this snarkiness of Twitter*, and most of the straining-for-cleverness blogs⁺.  Start instead with what you hear in the stadium.

I've been chewing on this issue all morning and I think there are three possible explanations:

1) The Linc <> The Vet -- The 700 Level is dead, the crowd now slants more towards "people who can afford the tickets," and years of success (across a couple sports) have taken the edge off the fanbase.  

All these things are true, but all these things have also been true for awhile. They didn't help McNabb very much.

This feels more like a contributing factor then a root cause.  

2) The fans have given up -- This is the bad one for Andy Reid.  Fans aren't just angry, they're despondent.  It's hard to get too far up or down when you know the defense can't hold any lead and, well, the defense can't hold any lead.

I know a couple people who go to games regularly and I think they might lean in this direction.  They're not sure it's even worth going to watch them lose and then when their worst fears play out on the field, there's really not much to do beyond getting another beer and watching the cheerleaders and/or drunken brawls.  But I prefer the last theory, no doubt because it's the most interesting.

3) The fans are really, really conflicted -- Consider what's happened in the past two years.  McNabb, the target of so much fan vitriol over the years, was booted out of town.  This, surprisingly, did not solve all our problems.

The heir apparent, wasn't.  The reclamation project, for a short while, was, beyond on our wildest dreams.  Then he sort of was, then he kind of wasn't.

The biggest kick in the teeth, though, came on the other side of the football, where a once proud defense coached by a legend still uses the master's terminology, but otherwise bears no resemblance to its past self as it whipsaws between schemes that ranged from overly complicated to frustratingly basic (and yet seemingly no easier to get the hang of).

I'm not sure fans know what to think anymore.  The easy explanations are out the window (other than firing Castillo).  Reid made by far the biggest mistake of the (off)season, but on the other hand he's a proven coach whose average annual output easily crushes most retreads (Shanahan) or flavors-of-the-month (Spagnuolo).  

Has Reid done enough to be fired?  Certainly.  Does it feel like throwing Roseman out after him might help, too?  Yep, sure does.

But do you really believe, deep down in your heart of hearts, that we're likely to be better off in two years if we go down that road?  That's a much tougher question. 

And so we boo, because the effort stinks and the execution is embarrassing, but it's missing the hard edge that only comes when a critical mass of the fans really, truly want to see change.

So now we get to DeSean Jackson.  

The meager boos DeSean received yesterday were a woefully inadequate response to what he did on the field.  That was the modern era's "for who, for what" game and for as much as he avoided the galvanizing post-game soundbite, he might as well get those words tattooed on his arms, since he's not doing much else with them other than bracing his falls as he crumples helplessly to the ground any time a DB comes within 10 yards of him. 

So what happened?  Why isn't he getting the McNabb / Schmidt / Lindros treatment?  What's different about DeSean?

I think it's this:  DeSean is the evolutionary Allen Iverson.  Fans know he's flawed.  They know he doesn't do all the things he should.  They know that for all his amazing talent, for as much as he's a threat to score any time the ball touches his hands, he will always be a limited player who requires his coaches to spend as much time scheming around his weaknesses as opponents spend scheming around his strengths.

There are, to be sure, differences between the two players.  Iverson would have died before he'd let the threat of contact stop him from getting to the basket.  DeSean is, comparatively speaking, a giant wuss.  On the other hand, DeSean's never thrown his wife out of the house naked before, either, so it's definitely good news / bad news.

I'm not sure I'll ever understand the selective Rocky-ism of Philadelphia fans that lionizes immensely talented, but fundamentally flawed, players like Iverson and DeSean while absolutely destroying fundamentally limited, but immensely high effort guys like Chad Hall and Reno Mahe, but it's a real thing, and it remains the key to understanding why, on a horrible day like yesterday, fans booed more loudly for Chad Hall's lone carry than they did for DeSean's two killer drops.

With that said, there are five games left.  Your move, Jackson.

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* Guilty!
⁺ Guilty again! 

Did Not Expect This

Because I know at least a few folks aren't on Twitter but still keep this feed in their readers, here you go:

(I tried to remove special teams tackles by using these numbers.  Tackle stats vary by source, but that should get us in the ballpark.)

This really surprised me.  Doesn't it feel like our linebackers aren't doing anything this year?  And that our front four and secondary are making all the stops?

Not so much.  And it's not about a run/pass difference:

Weird.  And totally deflating for the cool graphic I had planned.  Oh well.

Well Now I've Seen Everything

I'm finally getting around to re-watching the Bills game tonight.  NFL.com has seriously jacked up its video functionality, but it's worth going to the play-by-play page and then clicking on "watch highlight" for the first Vick interception. (You may have to click on a different one, then click that one. Like I said, they've broken it.)

It's an RB screen to the left, so why are Celek, Herremans and Watkins all jetting out to the right?  At first I thought maybe they'd just had a mix-up on direction, but no, the wide receiver on the right also steps back off the line.  

That's right.  The Eagles ran fake WR screen right, RB screen left.

So not only were Kelce and Dunlap the only ones hanging around to block for Vick, he also had to fake right, spin around and then get the ball to Shady, who only had one linemen left to block in front of him, since everyone else was busy doing other things.

I don't think we'll see this one again any time soon.

If You're Going to Blame the Wide Nine ...

At least make sure it's the wide nine.

Fred Jackson's comments after the game, as reported by Rich Hofmann and then cited as compelling evidence by everyone and his or her mother:

"[The shovel pass] was something we wanted to take advantage of with them bringing that wide nine," said Bills running back Fred Jackson, who ran 26 times for 111 yards and a touchdown and caught six passes for 85 yards in Buffalo's 31-24 win over the Eagles.

"Again, hats off to our coaches' scouting. They see things like that. We haven't run the shovel pass all year and we put it in there so we really worked on it. It was something that we thought we could take advantage of."

And the screens?

"Again, wide nines," Jackson said. "They like to get upfield and we knew as long as we could get that nine [the widest defensive end] upfield, we could get under him and be able to spring off it."

So let's start with the shovel passes.  The Bills ran three of them.  They gained 7, -2 and 9 yards (plus a 15-yard facemask on Nnamdi, but if you want to blame that on Washburn...).  That's an average of 4.7 yards per play.

And the running back screens?  Those went for 49, 5, 3 and -3 yards. That's one big play and three that went nowhere.

But wait, you say, what about the one big play?  Doesn't that prove the wide nine is terrible, because like Jackson said, all you need to do is run it to the side with the DE standing waaaaaay out there and it will work every time?

Uh-huh.  Only problem is, here's the pre-snap alignment on that one (click for larger):

Well, that's strange.  Because that screen pass went to the right and yet the wide nine DE in this case seems to be on the other side.  It's almost like Jason Babin was lined up in a perfectly conventional position over there. Do we have another angle on that?

What if you got totally crazy, dumped the screen captures into Photoshop and then adjusted these two pictures so that you were getting a straight-on perspective:

Yep.  It's like Hofmann (almost) said:

Out of the mouths of opponents full of themselves, and full of victory, oft times come gems complete and utter BS. 

In Which We Take A (Short) Break From Our Previously Scheduled Castillo Bashing

There's no element of fandom I dislike more than the "burn this village to save it" crowd.  Five minutes after the loss, when the rest of us are just angry about that, they're already off on their tiresome crusades about how the result proves so-and-so needs to go, even if such discussions are awkward now that he's playing in Minnesota.

You won't get that here.  If the defense improves enough to at least get out of the offense's way, I'll be happy, even if that potentially sets up a dumb decision next January after an early-round playoff loss.  So be it.

At this point, I think I've pretty much spoken my piece regarding Castillo.  If you've stopped by during the last few days, you know I thought it was a dumb decision at the time, that the past four weeks have gone a long way towards proving how dumb the decision was, and -- this is the most important part -- that even if Castillo can somehow figure out how to cobble all this talent together into a decent unit, there's little to no chance he's the best long-term answer.

So while it was fun to get back up on the horse for a week, that pretty much wraps things up around here for awhile.  I'll obviously still be on Twitter and who knows, maybe we'll again see a double coincidence of a quiet work week and a soapbox-worthy development.

Thanks all.

Why Coaching Matters

In fairness, he inherited a unit that had issues.  Maybe half the guys were plus performers, but the rest were sub-replacement level.  The middle was especially bad.

The front office didn't do much to help either.  Oh sure, there was the one high-profile summer addition, but it's not like he's panned out all that well. The other options were roster leftovers from last year, late round picks and, literally, street free agents.

Throw in a completely new system -- for which a lot of the current personnel weren't a great match -- and it's probably not too surprising that we've seen them take such a giant step backwards, statistically:

Oh wait, that's not what we've seen at all.

Two Blitzes

A reader, to whom I may or may not be related, asked a question earlier about our blitzing.  Here are two representative plays.

This first one starts with a bad guess.  Castillo calls Brian Rolle's number on an outside blitz on a play where the 49ers decided to run up the middle.  

Things to notice (after you get through the previous play that I also accidentally recorded):

• Rolle lines up outside the DE.  There's literally no reason for him to be out there unless he's blitzing.  No back on that side, no tight end, no nothin'.
• The play itself is not a draw, even though that's sort of what you'd expect in that situation.
• It does involve one of those ****ing trap blocks we're seeing over and over and over again this year (watch the LT).
• Nnamdi and Allen are in tight, but both are primarily concerned about the pass.  The receiver "blocks" Nnamdi by just running away from the play.
• Babin, headed for the quarterback, takes himself out of the play. [Which is a) his job but b) the difference between Babin and Cole.]
• Chaney gets blocked.  Again.
• Allen is very slow to recognize the play, then gets blown out of the hole once he does see what's going on.
• Page takes one of his typically great angles towards the ball carrier.

Next blitz was one of the touchdowns.  Try to pause the video right at the moment Alex Smith is ready to throw.  There are four receivers on the play. By my count, all four are open and three of the four offer pitch-and-catch first downs:

This is one of those plays that's so bad it's hard to tell who exactly screwed up.  It's like the three guys in the back are playing a completely different defense than the seven guys rushing the quarterback, and it's not at all clear what Rolle was (or was supposed to be) doing.  And I don't mean that as a knock.  I literally have no idea.

If You're a Game Re-Watcher

Check out the difference between our first and second half defensive philosophies.

In the first half, we played a very run-focused defense. Lots of base personnel and then both safeties really close to the line of scrimmage. (They may have been just deep enough that you could say they weren't truly in the box, but they were close.)  One CB usually played deep middle.

This worked.  Not every play (stop me if you've heard this before), but "if you take away the one big run" in the first half, our guys were actually pretty good.

In the second half, once we got the big lead, we changed what we were doing.  Our safeties started playing back, we took linebackers off the field, and we tried to play coverages inside with (primarily) our $10 million slot corner.  This gutted a run defense that really needs all the help it can get. You saw the result.

This gets to a larger problem.  Lots of people -- me included -- have been trying to figure out why we don't just solve the opposing tight end problem by letting Nnamdi shut the guy down.  The issue is that while that works great when the other guys try to pass, it's not so awesome when they try to run.  

I know this will come as a shock, but it turns out our megabucks shutdown boundary cornerback isn't really all that comfortable mixing it up inside as a quasi-linebacker.  Nor are DRC, Joselio or even, frankly, Nate Allen.

Unfrotunately, these were all guys we stuffed into the box at the end of the game when we went into "play with the lead" mode. 

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A number of people have asked me to make some more constructive suggestions about what we should do with the defense.  Honestly, I think it's pretty clear at this point.  Three steps:

1)  You're not stopping the run with just the front seven or especially a front six.  Unless we're just getting absolutely strafed, we need a perma-box safety.

Nate Allen can't fill that role.  Jarrad Page looks the part, but I've never seen a guy take so many bad angles in run support.  Kurt Coleman is ... something I'm not going to repeat in a public forum.  That leaves one other guy:

Jarrett can play FS or SS. I think he’s okay in space. I think he really shines when he plays in the box. He is a good hitter, but I’m real impressed with him as a tackler ... Jarrett goes low when he tackles and pretty consistently is able to wrap up his targets ... 

I happened to re-listen to Greg Cosell of NFL Films talking about him to Dave Spadaro.  Greg loved Jarrett.  I think he said Jaiquawn was his highest rated Safety in the whole draft ... 

Jarrett played in the Senior Bowl.  A dedicated Temple fan put together a video of Jarrett’s snaps from the game.  He played both SS and FS. He looks so much more natural in the box.  The thing to watch for in this video is just how physical he is with guys who try to block him. You’ll also see him in man coverage in some sets.  That isn’t his strength, but he’s also not completely lost.

At some point, you have to try him.*

2)  Wish the guys on the outside luck.  Tell them this is why they make eight figure salaries.

3)  There is no step 3.

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* Speaking of guys you have to try ... we watched Danny Watkins in the preseason, so we know just how, er, unpolished he is as a player, but every day he can't beat out Kyle DeVan at the top of the depth chart is a day Howie Roseman should be forced to run 10 laps.  DeVan struggled mightily last game.

How Was This Supposed to Have Worked?

After the initial Castillo hiring bombshell, I tried to make sense of Andy's thinking.  Clearly he hadn't gone out and looked for the guy who was most likely to succeed while coaching this defense.  If he had, he'd have hired, you know, a guy who knew how to coach defense.

I eventually settled on three possible justifications:

1)  Reid thought Castillo could function as a "head coach of the defense" if they signed enough veteran talent and experienced position coaches.

2)  Reid worried about the impact of the lockout on scheme installations and decided he didn't want to bring someone in who would make too many changes in terminology, etc.  And unfortunately JJ's former assistants all have jobs (or had just been fired by Andy).

3)  Reid wanted to put Castillo on the Harbaugh Plan, where a guy in a dead-end coaching job gets moved somewhere else as a transitional step towards being hired away as a head coach.

As usual, no one outside the inner circle has any idea what Reid was actually thinking, but if you're looking for explanations that go beyond, "What kind of idiot hires an offensive line coach to be his defensive coordinator?" I think these are where you start.

So let's unpack these ideas for a minute.  

Explanation #1 has clearly been wrong.  Turns out, you need a defensive coordinator who can make solid playcalls and adjust on the fly as the other team starts to figure out all the stuff you spent a week planning.

And the worst part isn't what has happened to this point.  The Eagles could easily win their next two games and be sitting, at worst, 2.5 games out of first in the division.  The errors so far have been devastating, but not fatal.

The problem is that now we know that our lack of defensive coaching is going to burn us at the end.  We might have enough talent to muddle through the next 12 weeks, but as we've seen so many times before, everything gets harder once the playoffs start.  Do you really believe -- really, really believe -- that Juan Castillo will be able to hold his own in matchups against, for example, Sean Payton, Mike McCarthy and whoever is nominally in charge of the Patriots' offense?

Yeah, me either.

Moving on to number two, I think we've now learned that taking the JJ defense, stripping out all the complicated stuff that made it so hard to coach against, and then grafting on a front four approach that's completely different than anything Johnson ever ran may have been, in retrospect, even harder to pull off than just installing a completely new defense that at the very least had front, middle and back concepts that evolved together.

Furthermore, if this season turns into one of those train wreck campaigns, we'll have wasted a year.  Because clearly Castillo won't be back and Reid might be one step behind him.  So now we'll have to go through the whole new scheme thing again next summer.

Number three is just sad.

It's Not Just About A Few Big Plays

I can't blame people looking for solace anywhere they can find it, but the comforting notion that the defense is just a few big plays away from being OK is, at best, half right.

Most of these columns were in yesterday's post, but I'm calling them out today:

Clearly the run defense has been victimized by big plays.  It would be interesting to do a distribution of all plays to see just how things are breaking down, but truthfully you can just go check out the FO defensive line stats to see where the problems are / confirm everything your eyes have told you.

On the other hand, the pass defense hasn't really been boom or bust (unless you define "boom" as "sack" and "bust" as "everything else").  The big plays certainly stand out in our memories, but if you look at the number of 20+ passes we've conceded, it's pretty squarely within the historical trend.

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Looking at "big plays" in a different way, it's worth checking out the Advanced NFL Stats site.  Our offense is ranked 9th in terms of Expected Points Added.  We're only 14th in Win Probability Added, which means we're making a lot of plays, but not making plays in the situations we most need to be making them.

On the defensive side, things are a little more consistent, since we're 29th in both measures.

And, once again, we've managed to achieve that stellar ranking against the offenses that are ranked 11th, 18th, 22nd and 31st by the EPA system.

That's good hustle.

It's Not the Wide Nine, But How Good Is the Wide Nine?

Buried within those tables I posted last night is an incredible stat.  Despite being cataclysmically bad in almost all defensive phases, the Eagles are on pace to rack up 60 sacks, easily the best mark since 2001 (as far back as I copy/pasted).

The Eagles are set to achieve this feat despite switching away from a blitzing, pressure-oriented style to one that relies almost exclusively on the front four to get after the quarterback.

Clearly they've got great pass rushers up front.  Babin and Jenkins have been tremendous additions.  Still, given the before/after comparison we have with Babin (in particular), you have to credit Washburn's use of at least a couple of these guys for being the proper way to get the most out of them.

Having said that, look at how little Washburn's scheme has done for everyone else.  Cole is on pace for 12 sacks.  That's pretty much his version of a .300 batting average.  Darryl Tapp chipped in one more sack before he got (or rather, as he was getting) hurt.

And that's it.  Those are the four.  No one else on the defense has a sack.  

It makes sense that we're not seeing sacks out of the back seven, because those guys aren't rushing the QB much anymore.  But nothing from Patterson?  Laws?  (And let's all hope JP's not about to get more opportunities.)

Again, I don't want to take anything away from Babin's performance.  The guy's been incredible and clearly we Do Not Want To Change Anything there.  That stuff is working.  But in Jenkins' case, I'm not sure how much is the scheme and how much is just him being a great pass rusher.  And for everyone else, there's not much difference.

Having said all that, it's absurd to blame the wide nine for the struggles the defense has been having.  Yes, it makes defending the run harder and we clearly have a scheme mismatch with our linebackers.  But even if you dump all of the run stopping problems on the wide nine (and I wouldn't, but go ahead), you still have to explain how a defense that:

1) Consistently generates pressure with its front four ...
2)  ... so it almost always has seven guys in coverage, of which ...
3) ... two are Pro Bowl CBs ...
3a) ... (and we even have a third we can bring off the bench) ...

Is so completely unable to defend against the pass.  That is absolutely not the fault of whatever it is Washburn is doing up front.  Ask any cover man in the league and he'll tell you front four pressure is the holy grail.  Get after the QB, give me some safety help, I'm good.

The back half of the defense is broken.  I don't know if it's a scheme issue or a personnel misuse issue or simply a playcalling issue (or some/all of the above), but those things are totally messed up.

Which is exactly what you'd expect to see when you have an offensive line coach pretending to be a defensive coordinator, trying to graft a front four approach that's almost completely new to him onto the back half of a defense he never had to concern himself with until six months ago.

The True Measure of the Defense's Awfulness

In tables:

By era:

Most damning:  The Eagles have so far played the 14th, 21st, 27th and 28th ranked offenses.  Not a good one in the bunch.  

The league's best quarterback is Aaron Rodgers.  Tom Brady is #2.

Samyan Manith is #3.

If you want to be comprehensive in your approach to assigning blame for each loss, it's fine to talk about the offense's red zone struggles, their collapses without Vick, the rookie kicker, etc.  Knock yourself out.  But those are bits and pieces.  

Meanwhile, this defense is terrible.  By Philadelphia standards, it's historically bad.

It's time to make the move.

Strike Three

The irony is that what we're witnessing is a total organizational breakdown. Andy Reid can blame the offensive coaches as much as he wants; the losses over the past three weeks have uncovered serious problems throughout the organization.

The players and coaches have been wildly inconsistent.  

The personnel team consicously assembled that group of linebackers, but they're also the folks who selected first and second round draft choices who aren't even good enough to beat out the sub-replacement level veterans ahead of them.

We're all generally OK with the cap and contract team, but they're the ones who still haven't worked a deal out with DeSean Jackson, a situation that's affecting him on the field.  They're also the guys who -- along with the player personnel group -- decided it made sense to allocate 19 percent of our cap to the cornerback position and 2.5 percent to the linebackers.

And as for the two at the top -- Lurie and Banner?  They signed off on what now appears to be the most damaging and delusional organizational decision since the day they chose to play hardball with Terrell Owens.

This is not about Juan Castillo the person.  I've never met the guy, but enough of his current and former players have said enough good things about him that I'm inclined to take them at his word.  Great coach, hard worker, really cares about the guys on his unit.

If this assessment is even half true, Castillo deserves tremendous thanks for everything he's done for this organization, best wishes in all his future endeavors, and a classy separation that preserves whatever dignity is still available to someone who so completely and utterly has fallen flat on his face.

The decision to make Castillo the defensive coordinator was unwise.  It was clearly so at the time and nothing we've seen since then has made it look better.  Reid made a stupid choice and his bosses made an even stupider decision to let him go ahead with it.

Coaching in the NFL is really, really hard.  Even the best coaches can fail if they're not in the right situation or they're not ready for the task they've been given.  There was never any reason to believe that someone so completely unprepared for this role would be able to succeed.

It's time for Castillo to go.  Hell, it's past time.  Last week's debacle against the Giants should have been enough.

But for the people who matter, it wasn't, which means we blew another big fourth quarter lead and wasted yet another superlative effort by a quarterback who looks to be living on borrowed time.

Time's yours, Jeff and Joe.  What are you going to do?

One Final Post

First of all, thanks for all the emails, comments and tweets.  I especially want to call out the people who compared it to a breakup.  I woke up the next day feeling guilty and remembering all the good times ... so yeah, pretty much nailed that one.

Anyway, I missed a couple housekeeping things in that last post.  First of all, for the folks wondering about Tommy's next gig, I'll post the info here so people on a desert island right now will know where to go.  For everyone else, though, the easiest thing to do will just be following @lawlornfl on twitter.  You'll hear it there first.  (@bountybowl and @shlynch will echo chamber it too, I'm sure.)

I also spent some time playing with twitter this weekend, since I was pretty much trapped and the walls were closing in (more on that below).  I'm honestly not sure what my long-term commitment to the medium will be -- although I'm enjoying reading things from the folks I know here as commenters -- but you may want to throw a follow out to @igglesblog, just in case there's ever news.  Please note that unlike the last week of the blog, I'm not foreshadowing anything with this announcement.

Finally, there was a little consternation in the comments about the "real" reason things were shutting down here.  Hopefully this is clarifying:

That's Evie holding her new little sister, Calla, who entered the world six hours before the final posts went up.  (Not pictured:  Dad, Mom -- sleeping)

So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish

PRESIDENT SHEPHERD
The environment got screwed. Nothing happened to you today, Sydney. Governing is choosing. Governing is prioritizing. I've made no secret of the fact that the crime bill was my top priority.

SYDNEY
Well then, congratulations. It's only taken you three years to put together crime prevention legislation that has no hope of preventing crime.

I haven't watched it in years, but The American President is my favorite film of all time.  That last line, the best in a movie full of them, eviscerates the president's justification for a political deal that handed him nothing of substance.  Just a Sunday show victory and a campaign talking point.

Life is a series of compromises.  As you get older, you make more of them. There comes a point, though, when you can compromise so much that it's hard to say if there's any real connection between intent and reality.

To put it another way, in IgglesBlog-appropriate chart form:

I will miss the charts.

All of which is to say I learn as much about the Eagles as anyone possible can who isn't actually in the locker room or part of Andy Reid's extended family.  So if you ask me for an informed opinion about the Eagles, I can quote you chapter and verse.  BUT, if you ask me about the prospects in this year's AFC South, I'm not going to be able to tell you very much ...

Which is exactly the problem facing national sportswriters, and why they have to rely on a variety of shorthand techniques when they are forced to comment on teams around the league.

That's from the third post I ever wrote here.  I still think it's true, and I think it's the biggest reason Peter King gets so much crap on a weekly basis.

The problem is that I can feel that cocky self-assurance slipping away.  I don't read all the things I used to.  I can't watch the games multiple times looking for things everyone else may have missed.  I can barely keep up with everything that's written here, and we're like 0.1% (counting the comments) of the total Eagles content generated any given week.

I still think I can pick up some things on the margins.  But I've been relying on those "shortcuts" I talked about above more and more as the season went on.  And that's not a comfortable place to be.

But there's another, much larger, subset of Eagles fans that simply want to learn as much about their team as possible.

That's why so many people visit PhiladelphiaEagles.com every day. It's not because we crave the incessantly pro-organization editorial slant. It's because you can learn a lot about the team, its players, the coaches and generally what's going on at the NovaCare Complex by checking in.

This really came through to me the other day when I was (back pat) talking to David Akers.  We talked for 10 minutes, but I could easily have filled two hours with questions and follow-ups.  And yeah, it was a pretty cheesy interview, but did you know he ran a 4.6 40-yard-dash coming out of college?  Did you appreciate, as I did, hearing about Sav's development as a holder?  Did you really, really want to find out what kind of shoe he likes to wear when he works out?

Ok, maybe not that last one.  But the point stands:  Every single player on the Eagles has an interesting story.  And I want to read about it.

And I don't think I'm alone.

That's from the best post I ever wrote here.  I was right, too.  Eagles fans want to know EVERYTHING about their team.  This was obvious to anyone paying attention years ago.  And yet you can still hear the incredulity in the voice of a newspaper reporter saying something like this:

"With football, and especially the Eagles again, I swear I could write about the back up nickel cornerback and get readers."

No kidding.  Who would have seen that coming.

The big guys have gotten a lot better in this regard in the past two or three years.  What started as a tentative toe dipped in the blogging cesspool has become a full-fledged appreciation of just how much demand there is for Eagles content.

But the problem is there’s a vacuum here.  Not of content, but of perspective. 

That's from the first post I ever wrote here.  And not to keep picking on the same guy, but:

Stories are often built on one small fact - the Eagles are starting a new middle linebacker - and then filled up with quotes and perspective.

With football there is less need to educate people – after all, this isn’t life-changing policy we’re talking about – and more freedom to flex your writing muscles.

Another differences is access. With the Eagles, there are very few people who have actual knowledge of what is going on inside the team, and they have no requirement to share that information until something is official...

In politics, we have much more information at our disposal and can often get the facts we need even when a political figure stonewalls reporters. To start with, there’s tons of information that, by law, is public. I could use that data to write a story all by itself, even if no one gave me a single interview...

Here we have on full display the contradictions that lie at the heart of the current sportswriting paradigm.  The quotes are meaningless, the issues are trivial and no one says what he really thinks

So why keep reporting things the same way?  Why keep chasing the same meaningless quotes?  And why blow off educating your readership?  Isn't that what we really want?

I swear, I didn't start this post thinking I'd go this direction.  Lord knows, if I wanted to get a few last licks in, I'd just look up whatever inanities Gonzo's written recently and take a whack at them.  (Add that to the list of things for which I no longer have time.)

But I'd be lying if I said I was ending this blog without some frustrations. There are literally hundreds of people out there who have deep, impressive knowledge of the issues at play here.  Some, like Sam and Tommy, get their stuff out.  Others pop up in the comments.  Still others email me out of the blue, to clarify something I've written or suggest avenues of further study.

And then there are others, like Gabe and me, who may not know much of anything, but can figure stuff out by looking at all that information that is public, not because it's the law, but because it's published everywhere or because they play the games on, you know, national television.

Is Sav Rocca a good punter? is the question.  Not, Does the Eagles' special teams coach who has a vested interest in the situation and can't be expected to answer honestly say Sav Rocca is a good punter?

The problem gets misdefined, and therefore the answers end up being, at times, distinctly unsatisfying.

Hammer, nails, etc.

As usual, very well-written and entertaining. I'm glad to see you are back at it and will take time to follow your blog. If I need information about the Eagles, I'll get it from you. I expect at least one post a week, my brother from a different mother.

That's the first comment I ever got here.  Now, 49,818 comments later, here we are.

I've alway said the community of people here was the thing I was most proud of with the IgglesBlog.  For four and a half years we managed to be that rarest of things -- a civil place, on the Internet, for intelligently discussing topics about which we may passionately disagree.

Yeah ... I mean.

That's pretty cool.

Farewell, My Concubines

I was e-mailing with some of my many, many adoring fans earlier this week when I let slip that I was abruptly retiring from my lucrative career as a high-profile Philadelphia Eagles blogger at IgglesBlog. Oops! As you might expect, this revelation was met with a somewhat predictable mix of shock, horror and disappointment:

"NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO," they said. "How can you walk away from IgglesBlog? After everything you've accomplished there? To have amassed so much, and then to just leave it all behind, just like that? Are you okay? Are you sure you're not sick? Have you recently changed medications?" 

Fear not, I told them, I'm okay. Sure, I'm drinking a bit more, but I don't really think that counts as changing my medication, what with all the other medications I'm on.  But don't you worry your sweet little heads, I assured them, it'll be okay. You'll somehow soldier on without IgglesBlog.  

"But no! What will we do without your usually-late-and-not-terribly-insightful Monday Eagles Hangover column? Where you use nicknames and catchphrases that don't really make sense, and post photos of sandwiches that you've recently eaten? I can't even begin to think about following the Eagles -- much less understanding them on a detailed, strategic level -- without it!?!?!?!?!"

While I was then forced to reluctantly acknowledge that the catchphrases and food photos were, in fact, pretty compelling, I still wanted to make sure that they understood that the decision had been made. We were moving on. 

"But what about the fan fiction," my adoring fans said. "You mean you won't be writing skits about Todd Herremans' van and DeSean Jackson's grammar anymore?"

Actually, I corrected them, I haven't really done that sort of thing in a year, but thanks for bringing it up -- it's just nice to hear it discussed in a context that doesn't also include speculation regarding my own mental illness and/ or whether or not the idea was lifted wholesale from KSK.  

"And the Delicious feed, what of that?!?!?!?!?!"

Really out of my hands. And I think Twitter pretty much filched their value prop anyway. Delicious was five years too early. 

"But, Bounty, what about the fame, the celebrity, the money from the acquisition, the women that come with being such a prominent and well-known third-rate Philly blogger?"

Look, I'm not going to lie to you. I know a lot of famous celebrities complain about the attention of the papparazzi, and how it's such a hassle that people are always coming up to you in restaurants and taking photos with you and offering you drinks and buying you steaks. But personally, I really didn't mind that sort of attention. There, I said it. And the money? Well, due to the runaway success we've enjoyed over the past few years -- first at BountyBowl and now at IgglesBlog -- money isn't really a concern for me anymore. In fact, I'm buying a fur coat right now. As for the admiration of non-famous-blogger civilians and the many ladies who DM me nekkid photos of themselves on Twitter, well, that stuff is all awesome. And I shall miss it dearly.

But now it's all done.  

***

Okay, now for the semi-serious bit. And I'm pretty crap at goodbyes, so bear with me. And if you feel like you've read this before, well, it's because you have.

Before we close this shop down, I just want to say thank you to all of you. For a lot of things.  

Thank you for reminding me that I'm not the only one with the Philadelphia Eagles problem, and that other folks also behave irrationally when their favorite football team doesn't win.

Thank you for demonstrating every single day that Philadelphia Eagles fans are more than the just the knuckle-dragging louts who pour beer on strangers and call talk radio to discuss why Andy Reid should run the ball more, inevitably prefaced with a reference to which other caller may or may not have pilfered their thunder. 

Thank you for reading -- and replying. The biggest change for me coming over to IgglesBlog from my former haunt was the outstanding community that had formed around IgglesBlog. You guys (and really, has there ever been a female commenter on IgglesBlog who wasn't Sheldon Brown's wife?) are absolutely phenomenal, and you're what I'll miss the most about IgglesBlog. You're knowledgable, you're funny, you're combative, you're cool. And I'm not lying when I say that I feel and felt flattered by every comment that anyone ever left on something I'd written -- even the ones telling me (correctly) that I didn't know crap about football (I don't) and that I should let the pros do their thing.  

Thank you to Tommy and Sam, a couple of guys that I don't really know, but that I've gotten to know really well, if that makes any sense. After being a fan of Tommy's for a while (and not just because his gear always made for an easy link in the delicious feed), it's been great getting to know him more and to get his take on the Birds firsthand here at IgglesBlog. Tommy is definitely the hardest working man in Eagles blogdom (IgglesBlog, HuffPo, PhiladelphiaEagles.com, SBNation), and I feel very confident saying that the name and reputation he's built is well deserved and that I will remain an everyday reader of his as he moves on to new ventures.

As for Sam, well, once I decided that he wasn't actually Joe Banner (and that took a while), I got to know a guy whose sense of humor, knowledge of the league and perspective on the Birds actually matched his much-discussed command of NFL labor and economic issues. And, on that front, is there anyone that any of us trust more than Sam? Anywhere? As in, there is no article that I read by a professional journalist on NFL labor/ cap/ economic details that I would believe at this point without Sam's imprimatur. If he isn't on speed dial for the local guys, at the very least, he should be. It has been a pleasure. Of course, now that we're Facebook friends, I can look forward to stalking Sam and his family from afar for years to come. 

Finally, thank you to the boss man himself, Derek. You know, like most people, I'm pretty gifted at hindsight and/ or second-guessing decisions I've made.  But I feel very confident saying that the decision to work with Derek here at IgglesBlog is one of the best I've made in my adult life -- this has been an absolute blast. In fact, the only regret I have related to IgglesBlog is that I didn't come over a year sooner when Derek first suggested it.

IgglesBlog is and always has been Derek -- the rest of us are bit players at best. Like most of you, I'm bummed I won't get my steady dose of Derek's take on the Eagles here on IgglesBlog; harassing him with e-mails and texts just won't be quite the same.

Still, life changes, and while the decision we're all making is the right one, it doesn't mean that it's easy or that we're all happy about it. Derek, I think I speak for everyone around here when I say that we're going to miss IgglesBlog and we're going to miss you too, dude.

And now, in the immortal words of GCobb, I am outta here in a manner akin to that of Vladimir.

Go Birds. 

Gratitude

Before I started contributing to this site, I was a fan. To me, IgglesBlog was a source of intelligent analysis, unlike anything else I had seen. And at that point, IgglesBlog was Derek. Bounty and Tommy came later, and I was a fan of theirs individually long before they started writing under the IgglesBlog banner. But to me, this site has always been about Derek, first and foremost. His writing style, his clear analysis, his statistical research, his video breakdowns, all of it challenged the way I think about the Eagles. I thought then – and still think now – that Derek was the most unique voice out there among Eagles fans. I am forever in his debt for having kept the quality of this site as high as it has been for so long.

At some point, I transitioned from merely reading the articles and to commenting on them. I found that the community of IgglesBlog readers was just as intelligent, thoughtful, and articulate as the site’s proprietor. It was a haven from some of the reactionary and poorly-informed Eagles fan communities that are out there. In many ways, I have enjoyed the comments section as much or maybe even more than I did the articles on the site.

To me, the thing that hurts so much about today’s announcement is that this community will be disbanded. I am sure we will all run into each other on other sites, but in truth, we will probably wind up scattered across various venues. So this is my last best chance to thank you all, individually and collectively, for all of the contributions you made to my enjoyment of this sport and of this team over the past few years. Thank you.

I also want to thank Derek and Bounty, who gave me the chance to write for this site, and whose posts have always been must-reads for me. And thanks to Tommy as well, who gave this idea of a merged IgglesBlog/Eagles Blitz idea a shot, and who puts in so much time and passion into writing about the team. I sincerely look forward to reading future work by all three of you in the future. Above all, I have always been a fan.

In conclusion, I want to say this to each of you: Thank you for reading, thank you for commenting, and thank you for being Eagles fans.

Reflections of the Newbie

I was the last person to join IgglesBlog and only got to spend about 6 months here. If I had to describe my experience in one word it would be...IgglesBlogtastic!!! What does that mean? Hell if I know. The guys told me to say something positive or there'd be no fruit-cup for me tonight.

Derek, Gabe, and Sam invited me into their cyberhome with open arms back in the summer. That seemed like a nice gesture, but it was actually just a ruse to lure me into the basement. I'd rather not talk about that incident, but I will say that the sight of Derek in a kimono is something I'll never get over.

It was fun to be part of a great team that did a "heckuva job" covering the Eagles. Derek is a gifted writer and often had a different take on things than I did. That was good. I like when a site can offer multiple opinions on a subject. Groupthink is boring. Derek made me question the way I looked at things. Sadly, I was always right and he was always wrong, but that's just a cross I have to bear. I will miss Derek's posts, especially the headlines. They were always interesting and clever, a slight step above my "Sunday Stuff" and "Thursday Thoughts" entries.

Gabe, aka BountyBowl, did a great job of bringing a whole other perspective to things. I remember when Izzy Stradlin left Guns 'N Roses. Slash tried to explain to the new guitar player what Izzy did, but wasn't sure how to describe it. Izzy was just Izzy and that put the band their unique sound. Gabe made things fun and interesting. He also was able to bring the gameday experience to the site. One of my regrets is that I can only talk about what I see on TV.

Sam is the best source of information about the Eagles and the business side of things. Period. I have to read his stuff about three times to make sure I understand it all. That's no insult to him, but rather a comment on the difficulty of the issues he's willing to try and explain. Einstein said that genius is the ability to make complex ideas simple. Sam does a very good job of doing just that. I'm also constantly blown away by his knowledge of assistant coaches. I know that side of things pretty well, but he puts me to shame.

Eagles fans are losing a great site in the closing of IggleBlog, but you know the old saying...as one door closes another one opens. I'll be starting an Eagles site here in the next few days. You can continue to follow me on Twitter, PE.com, SB Nation Philly, and ScoutsNotebook as well. I'm still waiting to be named lead NFL Draft analyst for Naughty Nurses magazine, but no update on that situation yet.

Thanks for a great run here at IgglesBlog. Time's yours.

Comp Picks

Someone asked me about comp picks. By my count, we will get two.

We lost two free agents who, as I understand it, will qualify for the comp pick equation: Jason Babin and Sean Jones. Neither was paid much as part of their new deal, more than $1 million per year, but less than $2 million.

The Eagles didn't sign anyone who will qualify; everyone they signed was either released, was a restricted free agent, or was signed after the cut-off date.

Thus, there are two picks coming. Because Babin and Jones were paid so little, and because that is the primary driver of comp picks, not performance, I would expect to receive a 7th round pick for each.