Even More Dialogue (Part Five)

SECOND UPDATE:  Wow, someone's been saving up some wild stuff about McNabb for a long time now.  Seriously check that out.

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UPDATE:  Part 6 available over on Gabe's site.

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You know the deal by now.  Part five is below. 

For those catching up:  Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4. 

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Gabe,

I'll be honest.  Yesterday was a little straitlaced for what we're trying to do here.  I knew I was in trouble when I asked my wife to read through the post last night and got the:  "It's just not ... I mean ... it's really good.  You made some good arguments.  I just didn't ... [pause] ... I think it's really good."

Kiss. Of. Death. 

So tonight you'll be happy to know I've taken adequate precautions to avoid a repeat performance.  Besides being ready to pick more than a bone or two with what you've written, I have also taken the liberty of fortifying myself with a glass of homebrew (relax, don't worry...), my fair share of a bottle of quite good Zinfandel, and, if I'm being honest, half a bottle of this. 

Of the latter, I am partaking for solely educational purposes, since we are currently trying to determine what expression of this style we want to be making for the holiday season.  (I'm looking for something with a bit more complexity, by the way, but maybe that's the downside of moving from wine back to beer.)

All of which is to say writer's block should not be an issue.

As for your point about the wide receivers, THANK GOD you made it, since things were getting a little boring with all the agreement.  To recap:

[L]et me propose a theory: not only am I sick of the wide receiver discussion, but I’m even more sick of one of its most ridiculous offshoots — the contention that Donovan McNabb’s career is somewhat wasted because he “only played with a True Number One Receiver for one year.”  (GCobb loves this one.)

Um, how about this: Donovan McNabb is privileged to play with the best back in the NFL in 2007 (not my opinion, the results of the Football Outsiders stats).

I'm a little "off" Football Outsiders right now, mostly because I reminded you that the PFP 2008 was coming out this week and yet somehow you received your copy two days before I received mine.  Next year I'm going back to BN.com. 

As for the point about the wide receivers, that's where I'm going to have to disagree with you.  GCobb is (basically) right.  The Eagles had one heck of a window during the Donovan McNabb era to win a Super Bowl, and sadly they always came up one guy short. 

This is, in fact, where I draw the line between myself and the truly committed stats geeks out there.  The real stat-heads will go to their graves arguing that the Eagles' offense in 2004 wasn't really that special -- that they were just as good in 2003, but because of a tougher schedule and some bad luck, things didn't work out quite as well.

Bull.

Look, I respect the heck out of the people who make these arguments.  They are people like former Wingheads (and current EMB) mega-contributor Austin/ArlingtonFan who know their Birds, have ample statistical evidence to support their cases, and generally aren't the type of people you want to be arguing multiple regression analyses with.

They're still wrong. 

You can win a lot of football games just by having a solid team, excellent coaching, and good schemes.  But the unfortunate truth is that in the playoffs all the teams fit that description, at least after the first weekend.  Which means it takes something more than just "solid" to get the job done.  You need to have playmakers -- guys who can do something special when everything breaks down and the game becomes just man-on-man across the field.

Ironically enough, I came to this unshakeable conclusion during a period of time when I wasn't able to be much of an Eagles fan.  It was the late 1990s and I was living in a state of relative poverty (yes, I could pay my electricity bill, but no, I didn't have a bed) in San Diego.  Not only did I not have NFL Sunday Ticket back then, I didn't even have cable.  In fact, to get my fill of football, I used to watch the spanish rebroadcast of Sunday Night Football from the station in Tijuana late at night, hours after the game was done. 

And yeah.  It was fuzzy.

In fact, if memory serves, I didn't even get to watch the Eagles when they came to San Diego to play the Chargers because the game wasn't sold out and so was blacked out in the local market.  Tough times. 

Since I couldn't watch the Eagles, the team I most enjoyed watching during that time was Tampa Bay.  They had a player from my noted football powerhouse of a college, a stifling defense (I've always been a sucker for stifling defenses), and a demonstrably good guy coach in Tony Dungy (ditto on good guy coaches).  What they didn't have, however, was a single offensive playmaker anywhere on the roster, which absolutely killed them in their 11-6 loss in the 1999 NFC Championship Game against the Rams.

That was my formative moment.  To this day I remember discussing that loss the following Monday with a guy I worked with who'd played tight end at Utah.  We both agreed that Shaun King wasn't a great quarterback, but if he'd had even one guy who could make a play, they could have won that game.

Fast forward to January 18, 2004 and what was maybe the most humiliating loss in the history of Philadelphia sports at the hands of the Carolina Panthers.  I covered this in detail a few weeks ago, so I'm not going to rehash it here, but if we ever needed proof that the playoffs are about playmakers, there it was. 

So yeah.  In hindsight, the Eagles screwed up.  There's no reason they couldn't have won at least one Super Bowl if they'd had a true #1 wide receiver for more than a single, glorious season.  (Did you know, incidentally, that last year the Eagles had not one, but two guys on the roster who'd been drafted ahead of Randy Moss?)

Where I diverge from the hanging jury that is the local commentariat, however, is in how I parcel out that blame.  Clearly, prior to the 2004 season, Andy Reid didn't think he needed "that guy."  This was probably a product of his time in Green Bay, where the story has always been that Brett Favre didn't truly reach his potential until after he had to give up the "crutch" that was Sterling Sharpe. 

But after that Carolina loss, Reid has done nothing but try to bring in that big name guy.  They signed Owens and Stallworth, but more importantly we also know they've gone after Moss, Johnson, Fitzgerald and (maybe) Williams.  In fact, I'm not sure there's a top-flight wide receiver anywhere in the league that the Eagles haven't at some point tried to obtain.

You know what, though?  Sometimes things just don't work out.  And as we all know, the only surefire way to get a truly elite talent is through the draft, when the player doesn't have the option of signing somewhere else.  But a quick look at the history of the "can't miss" first round wide receivers of the last few years shows that many of them in fact do.  So it's a little hard to blame them for not going that route either. 

None of this is to knock the guys the Eagles now have at the wide receiver position (much).  They're quality players.  It's just that they're not the kind of wide receivers McNabb does his best with -- as I've discussed many, many times before.

They should be perfect for Kevin Kolb, however.

Of course, all I've really done so far in this post is argue in favor of conventional wisdom.  Knowing how much I hate that, I've got a question for you:  What pieces of offseason conventional wisdom among Eagles fans do you think are most and least likely to actually be true by November? 

Please show your work.

And since I know you're dying to discuss the mental state of Donovan McNabb, please know that I'm all ears.  Not to give too much away, but my own personal tipping point with McNabb rhymes with "Ram Toliver."  I still haven't gotten over that. 

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p.s.  As for recanting my position on B. Ryan, don't hold your breath.  Defensive genius and personnel savant, no doubt.  Not my style, however.  Give me winning with class every day and twice on Sunday over I-don't-care-what-your-excuse-is-fake-kneeldown bullshit.