Is Dawk Slipping?

One of the great things about conventional wisdom is how often it's wrong.  Life would be a lot more boring if everything we knew to be true actually was.

Michael Strahan's retirement yesterday brought a focus on some of the older Eagles, like Jon Runyan and Tra Thomas, who had to deal with that guy for so many years.  But with everyone talking about how Strahan "went out on top" -- and yeah, they won the Super Bowl, but his personal "top" was many years ago -- it does make one think of Brian Dawkins, who has been around almost as long as Strahan and who was just as disruptive a player in his prime.

The conventional wisdom on Dawkins a year ago was that he would be fine for the 2007 season, despite missing all that offseason time due to the premature birth of his twin daughters.  That turned out to not be the case.

Now, the CW on Dawk is that with an offseason to truly get his body into shape again, he'll come right back, and fans won't have to worry about at least one safety position on the Eagles' defense.

The question, though, is if that's true.  Was last year a one-season aberration?  Or was it just another step in the long decline of a formerly great player? 

Let's take a look at the stats.  You can see Dawk's career numbers here, but those total numbers don't tell us very much since he's played a varying number of games each season.  So here are his per-game stats for the last two season:

Pretty brutal dropoff for the longtime Pro Bowler.  Just a tough season for him all around, even when he was able to get on the field. 

But check out his full career numbers:

By many measures, Dawk had one of his best seasons in 2006.  Even just looking at sacks and interceptions, there clearly doesn't appear to be any sort of downward trend at all.

So I guess conventional wisdom is right this time.  Eh, you can't win 'em all.

(And in this case, that's very, very good news.)