On Monday morning, I made an offer. The first person to chip in $100 for the Eagles Almanac kickstarter got to name his or her post here on the IgglesBlog. Twitter-er @Thunder_Lips -- who probably isn't actually Hulk Hogan -- is your winner. And since he's such a nice guy, despite not really knowing what he wanted me to write about and in the face of a number of truly ludicrous suggestions, he actually picked the headline you see there at the top. Which is nice, because it's kind of something I've been thinking about anyway. To the post ...
Let’s get this out of the way first – all coaches want players who are versatile. Why settle for tight ends who can only block or linebackers who can only plug gaps if the other option is 22 players who can do it all? The answer, obviously, is that you’ll never have a perfect roster. Even good teams have holes. You just hope the greatness of Brian Dawkins can help cover up some of the limitations of Chris Gocong. So when we say “Chip Kelly wants versatile players,” we’re not really saying anything about him that isn’t true for every other coach in the league.
Having said all that, I think there’s still something to this idea that Andy Reid and Chip Kelly come at versatility in different ways. You could either describe Andy Reid by saying he liked having a wide range of weapons with which to attack a defense or you could criticize him by saying he wasted too many draft picks and roster spots on a bunch of one-dimensional cat toys. It’s pretty much the same thing. At the individual level, the challenge with many of these guys is that they weren’t versatile. When MacJax get hurt, third-down specialist Jason Avant has been basically useless outside. Speedy little Ryan Moats combined Danny Watkin’s blitz awareness with DeSean’s physicality. Human sledgehammer Tony Hunt … ah, forget it. You could even make the case that something similar happened on the other side of the ball. Asante was a ball-hawking machine, just don’t ask him to tackle anyone. Jason Babin rushed the passer secure in the knowledge that every apparent handoff was actually a well-disguised play action pass.
