Should Have Seen This Coming

In retrospect, the DN's decision to give Winston Justice his own column should have been a giveaway, right?  For as much as that job requires certain skills (thoughtfulness, the ability to write, etc.), continuing to play for the Eagles is pretty much the number one requirement.

So I guess this one had been in the works for awhile.

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It's funny reading all the Justice stories today.  Everyone's talking about that Giants game as the day everyone decided he was a lost cause. 

Well, almost everyone:

As for Winston Justice, it's way too early to give up on him.  On the first watching, it seemed like he started out ok and then things just snowballed on him to the point where he was being outclassed on every play.  On second review, that wasn't the case.  He had good plays and bad plays throughout the whole game.  He looked like a guy making his first ever start going up against one of the league's better pass rushers.  But the talent is there, the speed is there and the feet are there.  I still think this guy is going to be a heck of a player.

I think that paragraph right there cements my status as the last person in Philly to give up on the guy.  If not, maybe it was this one:

Winston Justice is going to be a very good NFL tackle.  I've been banging this drum for almost a year now and I'm going to keep doing it.  Yes, Justice got undressed against the Giants.  We all know that.  But did you watch the Super Bowl?  How did the Patriots' Pro Bowl left tackle Matt Light look against Osi? 

...

The thing to watch with Justice is his feet.  They're amazingly quick.  And did you know that he ran a 5.15 40-yard dash (pretty good for a lineman), put up 38 reps in the 225-pound lift (very, very good) and posted a vertical jump of 39 inches (insane for a 320-pounder).

The athletic ability is all there, Justice just needs to keep working, working, working on his technique.  He had his "Ah-ha" moment last year against the Giants -- I have a feeling that now he's down to business.

The sad thing, of course, is that even in the oasis of relentless optimism that is the IgglesBlog, I eventually did give up on him.  If I recall correctly (funny how the memory, razor sharp on the two previous points, suddenly becomes all fuzzy), it was the blocked field goal that finally had me throwing up my hands.  Would have been a better story if not for that one.

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Funny line from Ashley Fox:

The funniest players, to me, are DeSean Jackson and Asante Samuel, because they are divas and take their diva status seriously.

Liked that one.

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Moving to less fluffy matters, I'm a little surprised by the free pass McDermott continues to get from the local media.  Yes, he's got a hard job replacing Jim Johnson and no, the injuries haven't made things any easier.  But still:

Could he get the players to play for him the same way they played for Johnson? And what kind of battlefield general would he be? Would he be able to adjust as quickly as Johnson when something wasn't working? Would he be able to decipher what opposing offensive coordinators were trying to do to his defense as quickly as Johnson could?

So far so good.

Not that JJ never made mistakes, but ...

There's another worrisome trend:

Despite all of the injuries (and cornerback Joselio Hanson's four-game suspension for violating the league's steroid policy), McDermott's defense still has played pretty well. They're eighth in the league in yards allowed, tied for 13th in points allowed and second in sacks and takeaways. Just two of their first 10 opponents have scored more than 20 points against them.

That's all good stuff.  The downside on that takeaways figure, however, is that they had 21 in their first seven games and only two in the three games since.  They've also recovered seven of the eight fumbles they've forced, a statistically improbable ratio that likely won't continue.

Is the point of all this that I think McDermott's doing a bad job?  No, it isn't.  But there's a pretty familiar pattern here, where a guy gets left completely off the hook for a long period of time, then he screws something up pretty visibly and everyone piles on in the other direction for a week or two.  Trying to avoid that.

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Happy Thanksgiving everyone.