Further review: Run-pass balance: Andy Reid still doesn't get it
December 23
Philadelphia Daily News columnist Lee Bowen
"LOTS OF PEOPLE seemed lost in thought in the cramped visitors' locker room at FedEx Field Sunday evening. The power to read minds would have come in very handy. Two offensive linemen huddled over the postgame stat book; one of them pointed at a row of figures and shook his head in disbelief. He quickly put the stats aside when a reporter seemed interested in what was being discussed.
Behind a partial curtain, outside the closed door to the coaches' room, Eagles president Joe Banner sat on the floor, his back against the wall. Banner, too, was scrutinizing something that could have been the stat book.
A million bucks' worth of salary-cap space for your thoughts, Joe?
All available evidence suggests that Banner and team owner Jeffrey Lurie have no intention of replacing Andy Reid. If you are industrious enough, you can still dig up enough stats from earlier in the decade to layer in with what's happening now and make it seem like Reid is doing a good job. We'll leave that task to others, though.
All we have to offer you this morning is despair. Despair over whether the people in charge will continue to delude themselves, thinking that being a play here and a play there away from doing something is the same thing as actually doing it.
I asked Reid yesterday if it doesn't seem he is answering the same questions, explaining the same failings, after every loss. Reid turned on the humor: "Yeah, you guys aren't very creative."
Yuk, yuk.
The Eagles of 2008, like the Eagles of 2007, have a very good defense and an erratic, often painfully inept offense that depends on Brian Westbrook feeling spry. That combination didn't quite get them to the playoffs a year ago and it very likely won't get them there this year.
So what will change?
Probably nothing. We will be sitting in the same news conference this time next year, listening to the same mush.
In response to one question yesterday, Reid said: "I'll take responsibility for that."
That brought back memories of an old comedy album (remember comedy albums?). There was a guy named David Frye, and back in the '70s he made a good living off his Richard Nixon impression. Frye had a riff about Nixon accepting the "responsibility" but not the "blame" for Watergate.
"Let me explain the difference," the faux Nixon intoned. "People who are to blame go to jail. People who are responsible do not."
Change "go to jail" to "lose their jobs" and you pretty much have Andy's shtick. It's his responsibility, but everybody deserves a piece of the blame "pie." Because when everyone is to blame, effectively, no one is to blame."
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