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Eagles-Cowboys Postgame Rant

Even the trumpet player busking outside the Linc could grasp the significance of the Cowboys’ 38-17 drubbing of the Eagles tonight: As we left the stadium, he was playing “Yesterday.” Depending on the Eagles fan, the yesterday longed for could have been last year’s NFC East title, the four straight NFC Champsionship Game appearances, or even the limitless promise that Donovan McNabb seemed to offer circa 2000. Is it too soon to begin to say this looks like the end of an era? Even if it is, that moment seems to be fast approaching. Nine seasons on, and McNabb is still throwing out patterns that land at the receiver’s feet, and screen passes that look like balloon tosses; he’s still holding on to the ball too long. The offensive brain trust still can’t grasp that the team would be better off running the ball far more often than Andy Reid can stomach. The evidence stares him in the face each week, and yet nothing changes. He’ll tell you—probably at tomorrow’s news conference when the inevitable question about the pass/run balance comes up—that McNabb had to throw the ball so often (46 times in all) because the team was so far behind. Yet in the first half, before the game got out of reach, the Eagles threw the ball 20 times and ran it 10.

Aside from when it blew the game against the Bears two weeks ago, the defense has gotten off easier, but tonight against a first-class offense, it proved it’s a mediocre unit at best. The Cowboys converted 8 of 12 third down attempts, and the two of the unsuccessful ones came late in the fourth quarter when Dallas was trying to run the ball to eat up clock. There were no sacks of Tony Romo, screens and dump offs to running backs were successful again and again, and Terrell Owens finally got his big game against his old team (complete with the classless “flapping of the wings” after he scored a touchdown).

With his family in turmoil, Reid could step down after the season. But be careful for what you wish for: Will that resignation include giving up his player-personnel duties, and will it be predicated on Marty Mornhinweg being named head coach? Reid hasn’t exactly done a bang-up job restocking his former top-tier team, and Mornhinweg doesn’t strike me as the type to turn this team around. For now, with the season essentially over—even if a turn of events as miraculous as what happened last year somehow occurs, the Eagles are already four games behind the Cowboys, three behind the Giants, and two behind the Redskins—will we see Kevin Kolb get a shot at QB sooner or later? If the team has decided the McNabb era is over, then why not let the rookie take his lumps now so that 2008 has less of a chance of being a lost season as well. Until then, we’ll be longing for yesterday.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 5th, 2007 at 12:43 am and is filed under Eagles Eye. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.