A Work in Progress

No one ever said this was going to be easy.

I spent most of the game with one eye on the Wingheads in-game chatroom.  I won't name names, but the natives were restless.  McNabb had some staunch defenders in there, but let's just say those folks had to do a lot of staunch defending...

Look, we knew this season was going to be a work in progress.  Too many young guys.  Too many questions about Donovan's knee.  A rebuilt defense.  While it's surprising how bad they've looked at times this year, the fact that there have been struggles isn't at all surprising. 

The season isn't over.

Let's repeat that.  The season isn't over. 

Right now, the defense is far better than it was a year ago.  While the offense didn't light up the scoreboard tonight, it looked like it had a much better rhythm than last week in Green Bay.  Yeah, 0-2 is 0-2, but I'm telling you, this thing is already starting to turn around.

Which isn't to say there aren't some questions.  Ron Jarowski spent most of the night harping on the inability of the Eagles wide receivers to get open against the Redskins secondary.  Right now, if you're just going by production, Reggie Brown and Kevin Curtis shouldn't be the starting wide receivers.  Reggie deserves the benefit of the doubt, given his past performance, but Curtis isn't making plays, he isn't hanging on to the football and he's proving us both right and wrong for writing:

"I actually expect Curtis to start strong, slow down in the middle of the season as a larger role takes a toll on his smallish frame, and then close fast once Andy and Marty start getting more creative with some of his packages so he's not constantly fighting off jams at the line all the time."

Right, of course, because he is having trouble just lining up on the outside and fighting off cornerbacks all day.  Wrong because it didn't take long for other teams to figure that out.  We'll see about that last bit.

That leaves Jason Avant, who seems to be emerging as the guy McNabb most wants to see on the field when he needs a receiver to come through for him.  He's doing it this year.  Baskett did it last year.  Might be time to give those guys a bit more of a chance.

Of course, all anyone's going to want to talk about this week is the performance of McNabb.  First of all, he wasn't great, but he wasn't that bad (28-46, 240 yards).  He's just rusty.  This is a timing-based offense.  He needs some more work to get things back together. 

He definitely looked a whole lot better this week than he did last week.  His progress was encouraging.  Heck, he even managed to run around a bit out there just to show he still could.

This is where the Andy Reid approach really pays dividends.  You might be freaking out right now, but Big Red isn't.  He's going to stay calm, just like he always does.  He's going to go back and tweak the game plan to "do a bit better job at putting his guys in a position to make plays," like he always does.  And he's going to get this thing turned around.

Just like he always does.