Asante Samuel Is (Not So) Secretly In Charge Of The Eagles?

As closely as we all follow the Eagles, our understanding of the team and its characters is ultimately filtered through the first-person/ on-premise reporting of the local beat writers and the official team communication channels.  The internet fan base doesn't go to practice and we don't hang around the locker room.  While that lack of access doesn't really impact our ability to blather on about what we see on the field on Sundays, it does limit our understanding of certain aspects of the team, namely the personalities within the organization that actually matter. 

That is, I tend to focus on the people that we hear from the most (those with regular press appearances, radio shows, etc), and just assume that they're most important guys/ personalities on the team.  If a player ducks the media, well, as far as I can tell, they aren't actually all that vital to my understanding of the narrative of the team.  Tree falls in a forest, all that.

Obviously, this isn't the case, with Asante Samuel as Exhibit A.  Bob Brookover has a good piece in the paper this morning about the ostensibly hidden role that a guy like Samuel plays for the Birds:

"It is kind of like when T.O. was here," Mikell said. "Everybody on the offense had that same swagger as him, and it's kind of the same thing with [Samuel] on the defense."

Samuel, the Eagles' most vocal player on the practice field - and one of the least vocal when it comes to talking to the media - said he appreciated the compliment from his teammate.

"Swagger, to me, means you're confident," Samuel said after practice Thursday. "I think it's important that you feel good and you look good and you are as confident as you can be when you're on the field. I'm just trying to be myself and I want to help everybody play at the highest level they can play."

Brookover jokingly references Samuel's "10-percent rule," under which Asante talks to the press only 10 percent of the time.  (Very clever stuff, Asante.)  But the reality is that we, as fans, don't really hear very much from Samuel -- though it seems like he's an extremely important part of the team's personality.  If you haven't seen the clip yet, check out the locker room footage from right after the Giants game (it's right near the beginning of this video).  

I was actually pretty shocked to see (a) that Andy Reid celebrated a huge win against the Giants by ceding the floor and the presentation of game balls to Asante Samuel, and (b) that Samuel would be handing said game balls to the two coordinators.  In the clip, it looks like Asante is kind of teasing Marty Mornhinweg: "Keep doing it like that, and you can be something special" (or something to that effect, it was tough to hear).   

Huh?  Asante Samuel gets to tell the offensive coordinator when he does a good job?  In front of the whole team?  Who knows the bigger context behind the gesture (maybe Samuel gave some sort of big speech at halftime or had been nagging Andy Reid to let him hand out game balls), but I feel like this scene amply addresses the ongoing "Who's the leader of the defense now that Dawk is gone" meme.

(Also, it highlights how little we probably understand about what's going on inside this team that we all follow so closely.)