School's Out For Summer

And now we wait.

With the end of OTAs, there are no more Eagles team activities -- mandatory, voluntary, or other -- until camp opens at the end of July.  And while we were treated to a couple weeks of actual Eagles news (complete with actual football practices and Andy Reid press conferences), now we're going to have to downshift a bit. 

Donovan McNabb signed on the line that is dotted just prior to skipping town for Arizona, where presumably he's working on his yard and changing diapers as we speak.  Even Joe Banner announced that he was headed off to vacation this week.  Thus does the week begin with a round of who's-better-than-whom debates in the Eagles section of the paper (and cheers to Mr. Gonzalez for backing the local guy and getting himself on the right side of history).  We shouldn't dare complain about this, either -- just you wait until I put up the post listing feature requests for PhiladelphiaEagles.com (if only I was kidding). 

With that in mind, some leftovers from the McNabb contract launch events on Friday:

What does Howard know?  I was jonesing a bit on Saturday, and so I fired up the podcast of Howard Eskin interviewing Joe Banner and Fletcher Smith, respectively, about the McNabb signing.  Eskin's line was that McNabb stole money from the Eagles (complete with police-siren sound effects), in that he got more cash without surrendering an additional time commitment.  This sentiment was delivered with the requisite pile of sarcasm, not-so-subtly suggesting that there must be something else to all of this -- that the Eagles don't just hand out money.  And, given that Eskin's pretty much Andy Reid's local PR wing, am I supposed to read into the sarcasm and believe that Howard does actually know something, and he's setting up the inevitable "There was a secret agreement on an extension after all"?  (The answer here might also be, "Gabe, stop listening to Howard Eskin.")      

The CBA can be your new catch-all excuse.  So exactly zero-point-nobody believed the hand-waving nonsense regarding the NFL labor agreement as a legitimate excuse in re: why they didn't extend McNabb beyond two years.  It even forced a moment of polite disagreement from R-Diddy himself:

Team president Joe Banner said the Eagles didn’t want to do an extension because it would have been too involved with the possibility of an uncapped year in 2010.

Well, that may be true, but I suspect the Eagles really didn’t want to extend McNabb’s deal beyond two years because they wanted to leave their options open. They still have Kevin Kolb on the roster and his contract runs out in two years. If they had added years to McNabb’s deal, they would have pretty much closed the book on Kolb’s career as an Eagle and they didn’t want to do that.

So this was a way of giving McNabb a nice bump in pay, along with some public love, but it also came with a clear message: No promises beyond two years.

Still, you can't fault the powers-that-be for floating the CBA as part of the launch-event messaging, in that so few people actually understand it (excepting the Shlynch-educated IgglesBlog readership, of course) that you have to be puh-retty confident to raise your hand and disagree with Joe Banner about the potential cap implications of a new labor agreement.  I might even suggest that we all begin to deploy the CBA in our personal and professional lives as well.  "Mumble mumble mumble, yeah sorry the TPS reports are late, mumble mumble mumble, you know, with the CBA and everything it just didn't make sense to start on those right now, mumble mumble mumble."

The Eagles CAN win the Big One.  At least the company softball team can.  I'd link to the individual blurb, but they haven't figured out how useful that would be on the Bloghead page quite yet.   

Bonus question.  Your thoughts in re: how Joe Banner spends his summer vacation?  We'll take location, likely activities, volume of required attendants in waiting and/ or virgin sacrifices, really anything.