Dave Spadaro was officially in backfill mode Tuesday afternoon, a few hours after we all learned about the team's unsuccessful pursuit of Randy Moss:
"Randy was always going to go back to the Patriots," said Reid. "He made that clear. I just inquired about it and took a shot at it..."
The Eagles, then, are being roundly applauded for their efforts to secure the superstar wide receiver. Truth is, the Eagles are only interested in improving the roster and making the best team they can possibly manage under the salary cap...
The final point is this: The Eagles really do like their group of receivers... Kevin Curtis caught 77 passes for 1,100 yards last year. He scored eight touchdowns. Reggie Brown struggled at times but put it together in the second half of the season and finished with a career-best 61 receptions. Jason Avant should get better and better with time, and Greg Lewis and Hank Baskett have been good when called upon.
The Eagles have had no problems – not last year, not in years past – getting the ball to the wide receivers...
Let's do something novel for a change and argue the other side -- Dave's side -- of this debate for awhile. Assuming we wanted to persuade someone else that the Eagles' offense was just fine as currently constructed, we would probably start by comparing last year's numbers to those of the previous years, paying particular attention to the Super Bowl season of 2004.
Here's a comparison of the passing game statistics for the last five seasons. It's the largest graphic I've ever uploaded to this site and barely fits my widescreen laptop, so if you're rocking the old 800x600 VGA display, prepare to do some scrolling after you click [EDIT: I forgot that TypePad auto-resizes big files, so it ends up being smaller than the original]:
Personally, I think the whole thing is pretty interesting, but here's the part I want to focus on (reorganized for easy viewing):
My first thought in looking at this chart is that -- for all the crap that happened last season -- it's pretty hard to blame the wide receivers. Just looking strictly at production, the 2007 group of wide receivers was at or near the top in every statistical category over the last five years.
As for the somewhat-maligned pairing of Kevin Curtis and Reggie Brown? All those guys did was combine for the best numbers of any of the starting twosomes.
Even more impressively, for as much as people say the team missed L.J. Smith, as a group the tight ends weren't significantly worse than in any season other than 2005, when Mike McMahon and company inflated their numbers (tight ends in contract seasons have no better friends than mediocre quarterbacks).
Looking at those stats, show me where the breakdown was and explain why the Eagles need to go out and get another wide receiver. I -- in the guise of my devil's advocate alter ego -- just don't see it.
Here's something else. Even the most ardent Eagles basher would have to agree that the 2004 version of the offense was good enough to get to a Super Bowl ... since it got to a Super Bowl. So compare the output of that team -- with a healthy McNabb, Terrell Owens and the ascendent Brian Westbrook -- with the 2007 model:
By almost every measure, the 2007 offense was better than the 2004 offense. More yards and first downs, fewer sacks allowed, better time of possession -- all of these things favored the 2007 team. With two solid signings on defense already, it sure looks like all we need to do is shore up the special teams and we'll be on our way.
Except not quite.
</devil's advocate mode>
Look, nobody is arguing that the offense was bad last year. It wasn't. In fact, it was pretty good. But it was also: 1) incredibly dependent upon Brian Westbrook, 2) more dink-and-dunk that in years past, and 3) absolutely terrible in the red zone.
First off, here's the Westbrook piece:
As great as Westbrook is -- and he's fantastic -- is it really ok to be running almost half your offense through a single guy? That's even counting the one game he didn't play at all. And don't forget, we all got to see what would happen without Westbrook when the Eagles had to play the Giants last year with Brian in street clothes.
(In case you've blocked that game from your memory, it wasn't pretty.)
So yeah, the rest of the offense did pretty well last season, but a big part of that success was that Westbrook was so good he was able to carry the load and open things up for everyone else. Now imagine he gets dinged next year and misses a couple games -- there's no give in the system. Without another guy who actually scares people, we have no back-up plan for our #1 weapon.
The second issue was the dink-and-dunk factor. Teams quickly figured out last season that you could slow, if not stop, the Eagles simply by taking away the big play and keeping everything in front of the defense. That forced the Eagles to execute on long, laborious drives to move the football down the field.
Some of this is certainly on McNabb and not just the receivers, but check out how many fewer yards the average completion went for in 2007 versus 2004 or 2006. I don't want to overstate the importance of this point, but as both Andy Reid and Jim Johnson have stated many times, it's tough to score in the NFL if the other guys are constantly making you chew your way down the field five yards at a time.
The final -- and biggest -- problem was the red zone offense. Back in December, I did a long post attempting to parcel out blame for why the Eagles were so much better at moving the football up and down the field than they were at scoring points. (If you weren't around back then or don't remember it, I'd suggest checking it out again.)
One of the issues was red zone offense. In fact, according to this great site, the 2007 Eagles were one of the worst teams in the league at converting red zone opportunities into touchdowns. Contrast those numbers to 2004, when the Eagles were one of the best teams in the league at nailing down seven, rather than three. Here's a five-year comparison:
Even throwing out the world's best kneeldown by Brian Westbrook, that's still an ugly trend. Now that the rest of the league has caught up to the shovel pass out of split backs, we need to come up with some better options down by the goal line.
A physically dominant wide receiver or tight end would do nicely.
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