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Sports Illustrated Skepticism

This morning, Peter King nicely summarizes the conventional wisdom regarding the Eagles offense:

EAGLES (Bethlehem, Pa.): Here's what worries me about the Eagles: skill players. I have no idea if running back Brian Westbrook can stay healthy for a full year, and a trusted reserve just isn't here. Ryan Moats has fallen out of favor with the staff, Reno Mahe is just insurance, and how can you trust Correll Buckhalter after two straight knee surgeries? And the receivers? When everyone's raving about Hank Baskett, I know there's trouble on the horizon. Now, I like the depth on the offensive and defensive lines a lot. The Eagles are going to be a load on defense -- maybe not as good as Dallas, but I bet as good as Washington. But that offense worries me. There's the same hole here that existed before T.O. Outside of Westbrook, there's not another Philly back or wideout who even remotely scares any defensive coordinators out there. "We'll be fine,'' Andy Reid told me and the rest of the free world about a hundred times. That's what he always says. And sometimes the Eagles aren't.

Outside of a solid to very good offensive line, the best quarterback in the NFC, a dangerous weapon at tight end and an explosive running back with some injury questions, what else is there to scare opposing defensive coordinators?

Here's a question.  Would you rather have McNabb & Brown or Bledsoe & Owens?  Manning & Burress or Brunell & Moss? 

The Cowboys have Glenn too, so that might tip the scales there, but otherwise I'll take the quarterback every time.

Tom Brady will be the 2006 NFL MVP

I don't agree with the people who say the preseason is meaningless.  If that were really true, the coaches wouldn't even bother watching the film.  So when I saw the Patriots had beaten the Redskins 41-0 on Saturday, I was intrigued.  Then I read this Washington Post column written by a clearly concerned Michael Wilbon and I became even more confident in my prediction that at least one of the much-hyped NFL East teams would fade by the middle of the season. 

Unfortunately, I then watched the game (through the magic of TiVo and the NFL Network).  In the first half at least, the Redskins actually played about as well as a team on the receiving end of a massive drubbing could play.  Quarterback MarK Brunell is clearly still not comfortable in the new offense, and they missed Clinton Portis, but they moved the ball decently except for a couple of big sacks that killed drives.  On defense, the 'skins didn't give the Pats much running room, had decent coverage, and got a fair amount of pressure on Brady.  I don't want to oversell their performance (they did get killed after all), but it wasn't nearly as bad as I expected it to be.

The problem for Washington -- and by extension the rest of the League -- is that Tom Brady is frighteningly good.  He completed short passes and long passes, passes to running backs, tight ends and receivers, passes where he had plenty of time and passes where he unloaded just before he got drilled.  He was fitting balls into tiny holes, without ever looking like he was forcing the action.  It was a clinic.

Here's a good comparison for those of you who have been watching the Eagles preseason games this year.  Donovan McNabb has been in complete control of the offense, completing 23 of 31 passes for 283 yards and a touchdown with no interceptions.  That's a completion percentage of 74 percent.  The guy is locked in.

Brady looked twice as good.

I'm dead serious.  Yes, it's the preseason.  Yes, the Redskins were without a number of key defensive starters.  But the throws he was making in the situations he faced were simply uncanny.

That's why I think he's going to win the MVP this year.  And it's also why I wouldn't read too much into that Redskins score.  I'd love to believe those guys are dead coming right out of the box.  Instead I think they just ran into the Brady buzzsaw. 

Lito Still Not Healthy

Wholly unsurprising story in the Inquirer today: "Eagles corner insists he's not all the way back; Sheppard still feels the effects of November's ankle injury."  I've been saying throughout the preseason that he doesn't look quite right yet.  Hopefully he can get this thing worked out pretty quickly.

Eagles / Steelers Recap

Can the Eagles just skip the final week of preseason?  Like just not show up?  What's the worst that could happen?  The last preseason game is a brutal affair, and at this point, the team looks ready.  The only important thing that can happen from here on out is some sort of major injury. 

Bring on the Texans...

Five big thoughts on the game:

1. Four games in and our secondary looks very, very shaky.  What happened to these guys?  Dawkins is still everywhere, but the rest of them continue to struggle with the trickier zone coverage schemes.  Brown and Sheppard have been on the same side of the field in the nickel a lot, and it just doesn't seem to be working.  Is Lito fully recovered from his injury? 
   
   Lewis is also still getting to his coverages too late.  On one play we had a DB who lined up over the slot receiver and then blitzed.  Lewis was supposed to slide in from his deep safety position for the coverage on what clearly is going to be the hot receiver.  He was way, way late and the Steelers completed the easy pass for a first down.  On another play, he was lined up tight to the line of scrimmage, but then had to bail backwards to cover a receiver in the middle of the field.  He saw it late and wasn't even close.  Only a bad pass kept it from being a big completion.
   
   We would have chewed out guys who made plays that bad on our flag football team.


2. Last night saw the reemergence of last year's starting wide receivers.  Reggie Brown had a nice night with three catches for 46 yards -- but looked bad by not coming back on a ball that should have been intercepted.  Greg Lewis caught two balls for 91 yards, including a 61-yard touchdown strike from Jeff Garcia (against Pittsburgh's nickel back, not some scrub 4th-stringer).  Jason Avant also looks like a big, tough target.  He uses his body really well.  Todd Pinkston looked like he had daggers in his shoes.
   
   Here's my guess about our wide receivers.  First of all, Lewis isn't getting cut.  He might get traded, but they are not going to cut him.  Andy Reid said a couple of weeks ago in his press conference than the only reason Lewis wasn't playing much is because they already knew what he could do.  I think that was true.  Secondly, I think we're going to be rotating a bunch of guys in at receiver during the first part of the season.  Brown should be on the field most of the time, but guys like Baskett, Lewis and McCants are all going to be in and out.  Avant should see time on third downs in the slot.  This makes sense, because why anoint one guy as a "starter" when you truthfully have a bunch of guys who are all kind of the same?


3. Correll Buckhalter -- IF he stays healthy -- is going to be the number two running back and help this team.  He looked very solid last night.  He's a much stronger runner than Westbrook and has nice shiftiness.  He did almost get McNabb killed on a missed blitz pickup, but he looked appropriately sorry for it.  The problem is, it's 50-50 whether or not he can last a whole season.  And that might be generous.


4. Jeff Garcia has happy feet.  He's always kind of been the guy who runs around wildly back there, but a couple years of playing behind terrible lines seems to have messed up his pocket presence a bit.  If we need to count on him at all this year, Reid's going to have to shift the offense to more quick hitters and three-step drops.  Otherwise it's like one read and go, which worked well for Vince Young at Texas, but probably won't turn out so well for the 36-year-old Garcia.


5. Darren Howard is easily our best defensive lineman.  He was disruptive again last night.  One wonders how Kearse will respond to the challenge.  Also, Brodrick Bunkley, while he wasn't quite as dominant against the starters as he had been in past games against the scrubs, is a big force in the middle.  He was drawing a lot of double teams, both on rushing and passing plays.  If he continues to improve, Mike Patterson will have the chance for ridiculous numbers this year.

And five little thoughts:

1. Duce is done.  Which is really too bad, because I've got my old #22 jersey waiting to come out again.
2. The reaction of LT William Thomas, when he had his guy blocked out of the play until McNabb scrambled right past him and the guy slid over to take him down, was priceless.
3. Too many stupid penalties.  Three 15-yarders in one game is ridiculous.  And Runyan could have gotten one for picking Polamalu off a pile some time after the whistle had blown.
4. This is probably just my bias towards the greatest late-night ESPN quarterback of all time, but Timmy Chang looks more like an NFL quarterback these days than Koy Detmer has in a couple of years.
5. Ryan Moats and Bruce Perry were absolutely strangling the ball when they carried it.  Guess the coach's "don't fumble the @#$^%@# ball" message finally got through.

McNabb Behind Palmer, Culpepper and Roethlisberger?

See, I would have gone for one of the guys without the shredded knee ligaments or weekly episodes of vertigo.  But that's just me.

ProFootballTalk Follow-Up

Just a quick note about an earlier post from this week, ProFootballTalk Guys Need to Pull Their Heads Out of Their ...  If you head over to PFT now, you may notice that the NBC Sports ad no longer appears on their page.  And the top of the page now includes this notice:

The views, opinions, graphics, photographs and any other item of this site are that of Football Talk LLC and in no way are the views, opinions or policies of our advertisers.  God Bless America.  Gesundheit.

It's a little defensive, but it's a firm stand.  Also, this paragraph has been stricken from the record:

We gave the Boys in Bristol a pass on the first installment of the new Monday Night Football, for a variety of reasons.  Primarily, we knew that we had a deal in the hopper with NBC, and we didn't want to respond to 500 e-mails once the ads went up suggesting that we took shots at the ESPN coverage as a gratuity to NBC.

As has:

As we said months before the NBC ads showed up in the banner of this page, Sunday night is the new Monday night -- and Monday night is the new Sunday night. 

...which has been replaced with:

As we've said for months, Sunday night is the new Monday night -- and Monday night is the new Sunday night.   

All of which is very interesting.  And also quite laudable.  It appears that either a) NBC Sports pulled the sponsorship or b) the PFT guys realized there were legitimate questions being raised about the relationship between their content and their sponsors.

This is all for the good.  I neglected to mention in my last post that I think these guys are pretty indispensable if you want to understand the backroom dealings occurring in the NFL.  Clearly, a great many people in the League think there's value in passing information to these guys that they want to see get into the public space, but that may not rise to the level required for the "real" media to report on it. 

In that regard, PFT is the Drudge Report for football, which ain't a bad niche.  They should take a cue from Drudge, though, and embrace their position in the information food chain.  After all, why be part of the establishment when it's so much more fun throwing rocks from the outside? 

'Invincible' Opens Today

Early reviews are in, and the consensus seems to be that 'Invincible' -- the movie opening today that needs no exposition for Eagles fans -- delivers the goods as a feel-good underdog sports story.

This is big news for Eagles fans.  I don't want to tip my hand prematurely, but I have a theory about this movie I'll share after I get a chance to see it tomorrow.  In the meantime, enjoy.

Correll Buckhalter to Start Friday Night Against Steelers

According to Andy Reid's press conference this afternoon.

By 9 p.m. ET Friday we should know if Buckhalter is really going to be part of the answer this year at running back.

Quote of the Day

Posted by "D Rock" over at the WingHeads message board:

"This team has won with it's Small Johnson.
And it's Pink Trash.
I think it will win with it's Brown Baskett."

Needless to say, I agree.

Dallas Can't Run the Ball

Last night I finally got a chance to watch the Cowboys and Saints game from Monday night.  I was traveling earlier this week and only caught a few snippets of it live, so last night I watched the TiVo.

Two major impressions.  One, the Saints have an awful secondary.  I have no idea what they were trying to do scheme-wise.  Their cornerbacks were giving the Dallas receivers a free release to the inside like they were expecting help from the middle -- which never came.  They were playing up tight on Terry Glenn, one of the fastest receivers in the league, without even trying to jam him on the line.  That worked out well. 

On one play, I counted three different receivers who were wide open on my screen.  So I wouldn't read too much into the success Bledsoe had in this game.  Yeah, he looked sharp, but his guys were mostly playing against air. 

Second thing I noticed is that the Cowboys really have trouble running the ball.  Their offensive line struggled to open any holes, even though the Saints didn't seem to be bringing an extra guy up that often to try to stop the run.  I went back and checked the first half rushing stats for the Cowboys' first two games:  34 attempts, 90 yards, 2.6 yards per carry, zero touchdowns and only five rushing first downs (vs. 18 through the air). 

Not good. 

Even without Terrell Owens on the field, the passing game looked fine.  And that defense somehow manages to be both really big and really fast.  But if that running game doesn't come around, this team is going to struggle to sustain any drives ... which has all the negative consequences we saw last year when the Eagles couldn't/wouldn't run the football.