Same here.
I wonder if now the sports media will quit with their obsession over this team.
Well, McNabb is available, I wonder who will snap him up. The Bears are mentioned but I don’t know if the Texans are that sold on their current group. And the Cowboys seem to be worried about John Kitna’s back.
Maybe not, but they’re less sold on McNabb. Also, they’d have to make room under the salary cap for him. Also, they’re serious about sticking with Yates for at least one week. He’s been studying the system all year, and the Texans are probably more than a little wary of introducing even more new players this time of year, especially during a playoff run.
Depending on how the next couple week’s play out, that might change, but since the Dolphins released Sage Rosenfels, I’d expect him to be ahead of McNabb in any consideration for future QB changes.
The Eagles need a QB, right?
I don’t think so. They only put in a claim on Orton t prevent the Bears from getting him, I think.
No, I hate the way the Eagles season has gone, because the media and every two bit football comentator is going to say “SEE! THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU SIGN FREE AGENTS!!!” as if the mere presence of asomugha or babin is what made the Eagles terrible.
They signed so many free agents though…it does seem that there’s some validity to the argument against trying to build a team that way rather than through the draft (the Redskins come to mind).
The counter-argument is that you’re sacrificing your future for this year. In the case of the redskins, they were trading draft picks for vets. In the case of the Eagles, the long term concern is the salary cap.
Are you trying to argue that - ignoring the long term factors - if they simply didn’t have those free agents on the team now they’d be a great team this year? What makes you think that?
Well, a lot of these ‘big name’ signings don’t fit well with their team. Babin is doing well, but Asomugha doesn’t do the zone/tackling bit as well as Eagle corners of the past.
I wonder about the Eagles’ QB situtation now. Do they keep starting Young? They know what they have there. Risk Vick? Throw Karfka into the fire and see how he does?
Last year they were a team, not a bunch of mercs.
I strongly suspect that they’ll be strong again next year after a year of playing together and fixing the real holes that they have rather than (for example) signing a buttload of Pro Bowl-caliber cornerbacks that couldn’t all be used for the sake of signing them. It’s not the names, it’s how they play together.
Steve Everitt is going to be the honorary team captain for the coin toss in this week’s game against the illegitimate entity.
Sometimes the apathy lets me forget just how fucking despicable everything associated with that franchise is.
Normally, trying to accuse someone of certain failures or personality traits based on what sports teams they follow is really stupid, but I think this may be a rare exception in all of sports - to be a fan of the professional football team in Baltimore, you kind of have to be an asshole.
This was the wrong season to bring in so many new players and coaches (hindsight). That’s the gist of it. For years the Eagles have managed their roster and contracts to take advantage of an offseason where they predicted there would be a surplus of talent and a dearth of buyers. They were right, they just undervalued how important an offseason would be to their plans. And once things got started, and started poorly, it snowballed.
The Eagles will be stronger next year if only because they’ll probably have a real defensive coach and an offseason to install a defense and allow the players to learn to fight with each other. The training camps are as much about bonding and coming together as they are about game-day concepts. This season was a worthy gamble because of the opportunity, but also because aside from Asomugha, none of the guys they brought in are stuck in Philly. None of them are a potential albatross. And for the most part, the guys they brought in have played well, it was the rest of the roster that failed (the incumbent defensive guys, particularly).
I don’t think this season has any parallel to the failures of other teams trying to build teams through free agency (Redskins). That’s just a lazy comparison.
No, I wasn’t really trying to argue anything, just merely pointing out that trying to buy yourself a Superbowl with big name free agents seems to not pan out as often as you would think, yet teams still continue to take those “let’s see if we can capture lightning in a bottle” chances in spite of that.
And also, speaking of the Eagles…I heard Andy Reid on the radio this morning and I have to say…you sound a LOT like him!
That’s kinda what I was trying to say, but you said it better.
I don’t think its a lazy comparison. The Redskins often go nuts in free agency and it doesn’t ever return them wins on their investments. The Eagles did the same thing. At least I think so.
The biggest difference is that the Eagles signed smarter contracts with younger players. The Redskins kept bringing in 34-year-olds who were clearly on the downside and giving them multi-year contracts. Most of the Eagles acquisitions this year have tended to be a bit younger and/or on one-year deals and/or opened up trade possibilities. (e.g. Young, Brown, Smith are one-year contracts; Babin’s was easily voidable; all 3 CBs have trade value) With the exception of the Vick and Jenkins deals, nothing they did this offseason represents an unreversible long-term commitment. The Skins always ended up paying millions in dead money.
That’s true, but the larger point is that with possibly a couple exceptions (of which I cannot think of any), trying to build a “team” out of a bunch of mercenaries doesn’t work as well as building a team through the draft with a couple FA’s thrown in here and there.
I think drafting well and resigning your own players is a better way to run a team.
What’s your sample size? The redskins, whose main problem is not free agency but trading, where they gave away lots of draft picks?
This year’s Eagles, which is one team with one season?
And add that let’s not ignore the critical point that they brought in all these new faces and didn’t have an offseason to bring them together. Mercenaries become “team guys” when they have training camps and offseasons to go to war alongside their new teammates.
So do rookies like the Bengals have without the very same offseason you mention. All draftees.
Each situation is different, of course. But rookies at least got informal workouts with teammates during the summer and some of them got access to the playbook during the very brief lull in the lockout on the first day of the draft. Free agents didn’t get the summer to do informal workouts and learn their teammates. And I don’t think Cincinnati went through as much coaching turnover as the Eagles did, either.
I’m trying to decide if I’m surprised that no one claimed Donovan McNabb off wavers. Two years ago it would have been stunning but so has his decline as a player in that time. At the time it seemed surprising that the Eagles would trade him to a division rival but that deal didn’t exactly come back to bite them. I haven’t seen him more than a few games in the last two years but when I did he looked OK physically, not the athlete he was in his younger years but still good enough to play. He just didn’t seem to have a fire left in him, like he was going through the motions. Would anyone who more closely watched him play add comment?
As I understand it, claiming him off waivers would have obligated the claiming team to take on the rest of his contract. Now that he’s cleared waivers, he’s a free agent, and his old contract is gone…any team which wants to sign him now would be be offering him a new contract (and, presumably, a smaller one). In other words, the fact that he cleared waivers may not necessarily mean he won’t be with another team in the near future.