Iggles Blog - Philadelphia Eagles Blog

Tony Hunt Graduated Just in Time

This, right here, is why I hope Joe Paterno coaches Penn State football until the day he dies:

When Penn State re leased a statement from Joe Paterno regarding the assault and burglary charges against six of his football players involved in a campus brawl April 1, it ended with the promise that the coach would have nothing more to say on the matter until it was fully adjudicated...

But he had plenty to say yesterday before a large Philadelphia-area banquet at the Radisson Convention Center. And the words were mostly contrite.

Paterno termed an "embarrassment" the incident, in which Scirrotto and his girlfriend apparently were insulted and allegedly assaulted before the sophomore safety called in the posse on the non-football-playing alleged antagonists.

In Paterno's estimation yesterday, "14 or 15" Nittany Lions players showed up at the apartment of the non-players involved. Sources say the figure was likely triple that when including players who arrived after the incident was over.

That response alone was, Paterno said, enough to warrant his own program of action. He said he will have his entire team help clean up Beaver Stadium every Sunday after home games this season -- a task usually taken on for pay by PSU club sport athletes who use the money to fund their teams.

This fall, according to Paterno, they won't have to do it; his guys will. And the money will still funnel to club sport coffers:

"We're all going to do it. Everybody. Not just the kids that were involved. 'Cause we're all in it together. This is a team embarrassment. I wouldn't call it anything much other than that."

Another good story about the punishment here:

According to Paterno, the Penn State football team will clean Beaver Stadium after each home football game this fall. It'll gather garbage, sweep stairs and maybe even hose parts down.

It'll be Notre Dame on Saturday, nacho spills on Sunday.

It's a job that usually goes to members of club sports on campus – say, rugby or crew – which do it to raise money so they can compete. Paterno said the clubs still will get the $5,000 for the job, but his guys, fresh off playing 60 minutes of major college football the day before, will do all the work starting Sunday morning...

At too many places in college football, the kids never are wrong. Punishments often are things that actually help the team: more running, early-morning weightlifting. It is rarely public, rarely embarrassing and never, at least to my knowledge, a blanket shot across the entire team, a true call for leadership and shared values.

But this is why Joe Paterno is Joe Paterno

He isn't worried about hurt feelings. He isn't worried about potential recruits. He isn't worried about guys sacking garbage on Sunday morning.

He's worried about the reputation of his players, his program and his school. He's worried about cleaning things up immediately, starting with the stadium.

Good on ya, Joe.

The Closest Dallas Will Get Any Time Soon

So Jerry Jones has literally bought the Super Bowl.  The Cowboys' new, $1 billion playpen will host the big game in 2011:

NFL owners voted yesterday at their meeting in Nashville, Tenn., for the North Texas group, which had Hall of Famer Roger Staubach lobbying on its behalf. The Cowboys' $1 billion stadium will open in 2009 and will have about 27,000 more seats than those in Indianapolis or Arizona - the other finalists.

Cowboys owner Jerry Jones said the actual crowd ticketed at the game could reach 120,000, with fans being able to watch video screens at each end zone.

I figure this basically puts the Cowboys on a four-year plan.  Obviously Jerry wants to win every year, but he's going to be majorly peeved if the 2010-11 season rolls around and he's looking at a team that doesn't have a chance to play in his showcase game.  You would think that would mean taking the long view, rather than going overboard to try to win immediately.

Except that the new stadium actually opens one year earlier, in 2009, so he's going to want to have a great team then for the rollout.  So that's a three-year plan.

And 2008 is key, because that's when they're going to be trying to sell all those pricey 100,000 season tickets.  That's going to be harder to do if the team isn't any good.  Better make it a two-year turnaround.   

On the other hand, the team is mostly built for right now, with key contributors like Terrell Owens and Terry Glenn not getting any younger.  And there's also the "Parcells?  I'm Jerry Jones, I don't need no stinkin' Parcells!" factor as well.  Which means the guys who get their paychecks signed by the big fella better be pulling out all the stops to win right now.

I hate the Cowboys.

Cool New Feature on PE.com

The Eagles official website has lined up a cool new feature.  It's a collection of video segments relating to the Eagles from a variety of media sources: http://www.philadelphiaeagles.com/homeNewsDetail.jsp?id=67221

Given that the site is the official house organ of the team, I don't think we should expect to see the most controversial clips making this page.  But it's a great new way to help follow the Eagles and it's a nice feature to add to what is probably the best NFL team website out there.

It's probably fair to note at this point that while we've all had a lot of fun with the ill-considered "gold standard" line -- given that the franchise hasn't yet won a Super Bowl -- when you're talking about everything other than the on-field product (which we'll give a silver for now), the franchise truly does live up to Lurie's goals. 

This new feature, which certainly didn't come free, is a case in point.

Has the League Caught Up to Jim Johnson?

There's a growing sense among Eagles fans that the defensive scheme run by Jim Johnson is starting to get a little stale.  Johnson's defenses of old used to attack, bewilder and disrupt opposing offenses.  The last couple years they've mainly befuddled their own fans. 

Local commentator Gary Cobb summed up the situation like this:

"The 2nd factor which kept the Eagles at the top of their league was the defense.  Jim Johnson did a great job of keeping offenses off balance with his series of blitz packages, but they’ve caught up to him and his schemes.  Rather than allow Johnson and the Birds to employ their tricky blitz schemes on third down, teams stay out of 3rd and long situations by throwing the ball on first or second down.  The word is utilize a conservative game plan against the Eagles by running the ball and throwing short on first or 2nd down.  The Johnson scheme has shown a weakness versus the run, to the point that teams are able to render the blitz schemes null and void, by pounding them on the ground.  For years Jim Johnson's defenses kept team under 20 points but of late, the Eagles defense gets dominated and never seems to step up when the game is on the line. If it weren't for the late season heroics of Brian Dawkins, the Birds wouldn't have been any where near the playoffs in 2006."

My sense is many fans would agree with most, if not all, of what Cobb is saying.  But let's look at some numbers first.  Here are a couple graphs with some key defensive performance indicators over the last 10 years:

 

The first graph show sacks, interceptions and points (points scale on the right side).  These are all key indicators for the health of the Johnson defense, which thrives on pressure and getting after the quarterback.

The second graph shows yardage figures, which don't fluctuate as much as one might expect, and certainly not as much as the point graph would seem to suggest they should.   

The immediate observation is that the Eagles' defense is not as good as it used to be, at least in terms of points allowed.  But this isn't a recent development.  From 2000-2002, the Eagles had one of the best defenses in the league.  Starting in 2003, however, it got significantly worse.  I don't really like to include 2005 in all these things, just because it was such an anomalous season, so if you throw that one out you see that there are really two point plateaus here.  The first from 2000-2002 and the second from 2003-2006.

The only interesting point I see in the second graph is a clearly identifiable trend over the past few years to give up fewer yards in the air, but more on the ground.

These real-world stats are validated by the hard-core work done by the guys at Football Outsiders.  Every year, they put the entire season's worth of plays through their statistical sausage grinder to try to strip out variations between teams and provide a truly comparable look at each team's performance.  This is what they've come up with for the Eagles (because it's defense, negative numbers are good):

Year	Defense DVOA	Rank
1998	6.7%	26
1999	-15.3%	7
2000	-12.0%	8
2001	-21.5%	1
2002	-13.8%	4
2003	0.1%	17
2004	-2.2%	16
2005	-4.6%	14
2006	-6.2%	11

If you look at their numbers, you see the same thing.  The Eagles were very good for a four-year stretch -- peaking in 2001 -- and since that time have been consistently pretty mediocre.

But check out what else is happening there.  According to their numbers, the Eagles' D bottomed out in 2003.  Since that time, when you control for opponent's strength and other factors, the Eagles defense has been steadily improving and reached a #11 ranking last year. 

Taken together, all these trends don't suggest to me that the best explanation for the demise of the Eagles' D is that the league has finally caught up to Johnson.  After all, if his pressure scheme no longer works, why aren't teams throwing with impunity against us?  And why has the defense been improving over the last four years, rather than getting worse, as the "book" on Johnson supposedly makes the rounds?  (The "catch up" side of the argument would have to explain why we just got around to noticing something that happened four years ago.)

I think the answer is pretty clear.  And I don't think it's the coaching.  Check out this comparison:

2001	2006
LDE Brandon Whiting	LDE Trent Cole
LDT Corey Simon	LDT Mike Patterson
RDT Hollis Thomas	RDT Darwin Walker
RDE Hugh Douglas	RDE Darren Howard*
WILLMike Caldwell	WILL Matt McCoy / Omar Gaither
MLB Jeremiah Trotter	MLB Jeremiah Trotter
SAM Carlos Emmons	SAM Dhani Jones
LCB Troy Vincent	LCB Lito Sheppard*
RCB Bobby Taylor	RCP Sheldon Brown*
NCB Al Harris	NCB Rod Hood / Joselio Hansen
SS Damon Moore	SS Michael Lewis / Sean Considine
FS Brian Dawkins	FS Brian Dawkins

For the 2001 team, I took the usual starting lineup from the team website.  For the 2006 team, I went by memory (with the starred players being ones who experienced significant injuries). 

I've gone through and bolded out the players I think had a clear advantage over their counterparts from the other team.  You may not agree with all of my choices (maybe Trent Cole is better than even and Mike Patterson might be a wash), but even if we might quibble on a few, the trend is unmistakable.   

The 2001 Eagles defense was simply far more talented than the 2006 Eagles defense.

It has nothing to do coaching or scheme.  It has to do with the fact that the players simply weren't as good.

Too many times in the NFL, fans overestimate the impact of coaching, at least right away.  Look at how long it took Tony Dungy to turn around (momentarily) the Colts' defense.  Look at how long it took for Marvin Lewis to have an impact on the Bengals' fortunes. 

In the NFL, coaching matters, but you win and lose with players.  The good news is that this situation is starting to turn around.  If you did a similar comparison chart between the '06 and '07 squads, this is what you'd see:

2006	2007
LDE Trent Cole	LDE Trent Cole
LDT Mike Patterson	LDT Mike Patterson
RDT Darwin Walker	RDT Brodrick Bunkley
RDE Darren Howard*	RDE Jevon Kearse
WILL Matt McCoy / Omar Gaither	WILL Takeo Spikes
MLB Jeremiah Trotter	MLB Trotter / Gaither
SAM Dhani Jones	SAM Chris Gocong
LCB Lito Sheppard*	LCB Lito Sheppard
RCP Sheldon Brown*	RCP Sheldon Brown / William James
NCB Rod Hood / Joselio Hansen	NCB William James / Sheldon Brown
SS Michael Lewis / Sean Considine	SS Sean Considine
FS Brian Dawkins	FS Brian Dawkins

So maybe don't be surprised when Jim Johnson suddenly "catches back up" to the rest of the league again this year. 

McNabb for Briggs?

I think someone might have been experimenting with some illegal substances this weekend...

McNabb for Briggs?  Really, that's the best you can come up with three weeks after the draft? 

If you're going to write something that dumb that late, at least make it more interesting.  Like make it a three-way deal where we get Peyton Manning, since you know the Colts have a hole at weakside linebacker as well, now that Cato June is gone.

How to Tell If She's a Keeper

Show her this and this and gauge her reaction.  Possibilities:

A) "Who's number five?  Is that Allen Iverson?"
You may be ok, since she clearly doesn't mind doing her own thing while you're watching sports.

B) "Let's see if we can find out who did that ice sculpture."
She appears to have very bad taste -- you may be able to stick around. 

C) "That's funny.  You know, I dated [name of famous athlete] a couple times."
Seeya.  And make sure your tests are up-to-date.

D) "Wow, that's just how I pictured my wedding!"
The woman you are dating is an extremely good liar.  Proceed with caution.

E) "I really hope Donovan's rehab stays on schedule, but either way we gotta take advantage of our huge offensive line and great backfield talent to run the ball more and control the clock."
Da Da Da-Da.  Time to go ring shopping.

Buffaloed

The Darwin Walker situation in Buffalo is just getting weirder.  First of all, Walker refused to report for any team activities until the team agreed to renegotiate his contract.  Now look who the Bills brought in for a visit in case they can't work something out with Darwin:

Whether or not he gets that new contract remains to be seen, but the entire situation has not kept the Bills from exploring other options. According to their official site, they recently had free agent defensive tackle Sam Rayburn (Philadelphia) in for a visit.

Next they'll try to work a trade out for big Hollis Thomas.

A Koy / Kolb Connection?

I knew there had to be something here.  It just made too much sense.

After the Eagles drafted Kevin Kolb, I started looking for connections he might have had to Koy Detmer.  They were both quarterbacks out of Texas, Koy's father Sonny is a legendary high school football coach in the San Antonio area, and Koy has had some free time recently.

Unfortunately, Google failed me, as it so rarely does.  I couldn't find any pre-draft mention of the two together.  But today I saw this:

Dan Gross | A Philly punk reunion

OLD-SCHOOL Philly punks should dust off their leather jackets, boots and homemade tees. Philly punk pioneers Y-Di, Flag of Democracy, Pagan Babies, Decontrol and McRad will perform at the all-ages Legends of Philly Hardcore show July 14 at the Latvian Society.

Which is a gossip column that has nothing to do with Koy Detmer or Kevin Kolb.  But check out item #4:

Out and about

Newly drafted Eagles quarterback Kevin Kolb is driving around in a yellow Dodge Charger Super Bee, on loan from auto dealer Gary Barbera. Barbera met Kolb, out of Houston, a while back through QB/ball handler Koy Detmer. Barbera, Kolb and Eagles tight end Brent Celek, just drafted out of Cincinnati, caught up over dinner at Saloon (750 S. 7th) Monday night. 

I KNEW it.  And yes, I need to get a life.  But regardless, I knew there had to be a connection, and I'm betting that the Detmer/Kolb nexus and how the youngster ended up the new Eagles #3 quarterback might make kind of an interesting story.  Now we just need to figure out how to unearth it.

(And yes, it's a slow Eagles news Thursday.  Could be like that for awhile now that the first mini-camp is done.  Someone please find the McNabb family and try to get them to say something dumb we can all overreact to for a few days.)

The 'N'-Headed Monster

As you may have guessed by yesterday's Tony Huntathon, I'm very excited by the addition of the former Penn State battering ram to the Philadelphia Eagles' backfield. 

I'm not the only one, though, with a number of fans, message board posters and local columnists/commentators suggesting that the selection of Hunt (and to a lesser extent, Nasti Nate Ilaoa) means the Eagles may return to the "three-headed monster" running back committee that worked so well during the 2003 season, Duuuuuce's last year with the team. 

Of course it's not just the draft.  After McNabb went down last season, Reid famously turned the playcalling over to his difficultly-named offensive coordinator, who shelved the high-flying passing game and based the Eagles' attack around the combination of Brian Westbrook and one badass offensive line.  (Or so the story goes.)  With McNabb's health again an issue in 2007, it makes sense for the Eagles to shift to a more ball-control gameplan that emphasizes the running game and keeping the quarterback upright. 

To try to predict how that gameplan might play out next year, I thought it would be interesting to look at how the Eagles rushing attack has evolved over the last few years.  Some of what I found was sort of surprising to me, suggesting that my memory of past seasons isn't as good as I thought it was.

Here are a couple of graphs to start.  The first shows the distribution of rushing attempts by all Eagles running backs since 2001.  I stripped out carries by quarterbacks and receivers because I wanted to get a sense of how the true running game had functioned.  The second graph shows the distribution of yards gained, which -- not surprisingly -- looks very similar (click the thumbnails to expand).

   

A couple things stand out right away.  The first is that you can see why Duuuuuuce saw the writing on the wall when he decided to leave.  He always said he wanted to go play in a system where he would be more of a traditional running back, but he could also see the (young) talent around him and where that was headed.

The second thing I found interesting is that it doesn't really matter whether or not Buckhalter plays.  If he's healthy, he gets a fair number of carries and does a good job as the number three option (Westbrook has been options #1 and #2 for a couple of years).  But when he's been hurt, the Eagles have done fine plugging in a number of other guys as the change-of-pace back.  Look at how relatively flat the line is that bounds the bottom of the graph containing the contributions of Buckhalter, Levens, Moats and everybody else.

In fact, there hasn't even been as much variation as I think most people probably believe.  If you controlled for TO's ego in 2004 and Mike McMahon's incompetence in 2005, most of that variation gets washed out.  Instead of rushing attempts or yards, I think there's another reason why most people think 2003 was so different:

Rushing TDs
2001	4
2002	6
2003	20
2004	7
2005	7
2006	9

Yeah, that's probably it.

It is kind of weird that Duuuuuuce's carries just sort of ... disappeared.  After he left following the 2003 season, about half of his carries went to Westbrook and the others just vanished into thin air. 

Last year, those carries all reappeared, just like they'd never been gone, and went right to Westbrook.  But that's a situation I can't see repeating itself next season.  The Eagles ran Westbrook into the ground last year because they had no choice, it was either give the ball to Brian or pack in the season.  This year, they're probably going to work very hard to lighten his load, particularly in the early portion of the season, in an attempt to keep him fresh and healthy for the postseason.

Buckhalter has already said that Mornhinweg promised him more carries this season.  That makes sense, now that he's had a year to prove he's all the way back from three devastating knee injuries. 

If the Eagles truly make a 2003-level commitment to running the football, they'll need to divide up about 391 carries (up from last year's 354).  Correll had 129 carries his rookie season and 126 two years later.  Last year he ended up with 83, so it's fair to guess they might try to get him back to the 125 range.  That takes 40 carries from Westbrook, getting him down from last year's high of 240 to a still-substantial 200.  Westbrook's previous high was 177, and I honestly believe the Eagles would be more comfortable keeping him in that range if possible.  So we'll call it 175. 

That gets us to 300 carries for Buck and Westbrook and leaves about 90 for the rest of the running backs on the roster.  Barring injury, I don't think there's much doubt that the "rest of the running backs" = "Tony Hunt."  Based on a 4.5 yard-per-carry average (not unlikely with this offensive line), he's probably looking at a 400-yard rookie season, which I bet would suit this team just fine.  He may even get his share of touchdowns if they start using him down by the goal line as their slam it up the gut back. 

The last graph is therefore a projection, based on those numbers, of how the Eagles rushing attack could look this year:

Man, that's beautiful.  Now we just need those guys to stay healthy.

Oh, and be careful how early you draft Westbrook in your fantasy league next year.

I Really Can't Wait...

... to see what the Linc crowd comes up with to welcome Tony Romo to Philadelphia next year. 

Here's an update on just how peachy he's handling the whole I-couldn't-hang-on-to-the-ball-and-cost-my-team-a-sure-victory thing:

It was Witten who sat next to Romo on the return flight following the Cowboys' 21-20 wild-card playoff loss to Seattle in January...

"It was a four-hour flight home and I didn't know what to say," Witten said Monday. "I just put my arm around him and said, 'It's going to be OK.'"

Very sweet.

Witten remembers Romo saying only one thing the entire flight.

"He leaned over and said, 'I wouldn't have wanted that ball to be in anyone else's hands but mine.'"

Teammates may not agree with you there, Tony.

Romo retired to a leather couch in his apartment and didn't get up for two days. Witten finally coaxed him outside by suggesting they visit right guard Marco Rivera, who was recovering from back surgery at a local hospital.

"I picked him up and we stopped by to eat at Dave and Buster's," Witten said. "I think they showed the highlight of Tony dropping the ball three times before our food was served."

You mean this one?