If I was head coach of the Eagles, I would have announced Vick as the four-week starter at quarterback. I would have given Kolb a month to recover from his concussion and brought him back to start on October 17 against the Falcons. As it is, Reid has decided to start Vick for the rest of the season. Whatever role the offensive line played into his decision, Andy Reid is responsible for the wreck that unit has become. As the coach himself often says, this one’s on him.
Early in Reid’s tenure with the Eagles, the offensive line was a strength. The line has been in steady decline ever since. Isn’t this ironic? People often refer to the fact that Reid’s job immediately prior to becoming head coach of the Eagles was as the quarterback coach of the Green Bay Packers. They don’t realize that he only spent one season in that role. Prior to that, he worked exclusively on the offensive line. Andy Reid played offensive tackle and guard at Brigham Young. From 1983 through 1991, Reid was an offensive line coach at four different colleges. He then went on to become an offensive assistant and then offensive line coach for the Packers. In 1997, Reid was employed as the team’s tight ends coach. It was not until 1998 that Reid served under Mike Holmgren as Brett Favre’s quarterback coach. The man spent over twenty years working exclusively on offensive lines; one would think he understood the unit’s importance to a football team.
Let’s look at the how the Eagles’ poor offensive line of 2010 came to be:
For nearly a full decade, the Eagles had possibly the best pair of tackles in the National Football League. Tra Thomas, Ray Rhodes’ final first round draft pick, started at left tackle in Philly for eleven years before the Eagles let him leave as a free agent after the 2008 season. Jon Runyan arrived in 2000 as a free agent from Tennessee and started at right tackle in every game the Eagles played from the day he showed up through the 2008 postseason, when the Eagles allowed him to leave via free agency. When their Eagle careers ended, Thomas and Runyan were 34 and 35, respectively. Amazingly, despite knowing both tackles’ contracts ended after 2008 and that their ages would keep the Eagles from trying to retain either of them, the team had no solid plan for replacing the bookends of the offensive line.
In 2009, the Eagles allowed 38 sacks. That was only the third time the Eagles gave up that many sacks since 2003. The other two years were 2005 and 2007. 2005 was the year the Eagles suffered from Super Bowl hangover and finished in last place in the NFC East. 2007 was a different story. Tra Thomas missed the September 30 game against the Giants due to injury. The team’s second-round draft pick from 2006, Winston Justice, made his first NFL start that night. Not so coincidentally, the Eagles allowed twelve sacks that night. Osi Umenyiora, whom Justice spent most of the night attempting to block, was credited with six of them. Winston Justice started every game at right tackle for the 2009 Eagles.
How did Justice come to be the Eagles’ starting right tackle last season? Oh, boy, what a mess. Like most messes, this story is not a simple one, and it revolves around uncertainty. It starts on April 24, 2004, the first day of the NFL Draft. In the first round, the Eagles traded up from the 28th pick to the 16th pick. At the time of the trade, everybody knew the Eagles made the trade so they could draft Steven Jackson, the running back from Oregon State. Instead, Andy Reid surprised the entire football world by selecting Shawn Andrews, an All-American tackle from Arkansas. Because Thomas and Runyan were on the team, Reid envisioned Andrews as a guard. Although a broken leg cost him the final fifteen games of his rookie season, Andrews quickly became the best guard in the league.
In 2008, it became apparent that Shawn Andrews was falling apart. In June of that year, he abruptly left the team for “personal issues.” He did not show up to training camp the next month. On August 4, The Philadelphia Daily News published an article in which Andrews spoke about dealing with depression. Six days later, he showed up at training camp. Andrews started playing again and began the 2008 regular season starting at right guard for the Eagles. In the second game of that season, Andrews left with a herniated disc. The Eagles didn’t expect him to miss the rest of the season, but he did. About six weeks after initially sustaining the injury, Andrews went under the knife.
With his physical problems supposedly corrected, Andrews was expected to return to the Eagles starting lineup in 2009. Andy Reid was still worried about the depression, so he sought to do what he could to make sure the Eagles became the ideal atmosphere for his Pro Bowl right guard. In late February 2009, the Eagles signed Stacy Andrews, Shawn’s older brother, to a six-year, $38.9 million contract. Stacy Andrews was a fourth round pick of the Bengals in the same year in which the Eagles drafted Shawn. Stacy had been Cincinnati’s starting right tackle in 2007 and 2008. It would have been reasonable to assume that Stacy would take on that role for the Eagles and replace Jon Runyan in 2009 except that he had torn his anterior cruciate ligament in his second-to-last game as a Bengal. As a preemptive move, Andy Reid switched the Andrews brothers’ positions; Shawn became the starting right tackle and Stacy was named the starter at right guard. It was a move to guard against the limited mobility Stacy would probably experience coming off the torn knee ligament. Still, the Eagles expected Stacy Andrews to be healthy enough to start the 2009 season (familiarize yourself with this concept). As it turned out, Andrews was neither healthy enough nor pass blocking well enough to warrant playing time. Stacy was benched after the season opener and only started one other game the rest of the season. In order to avoid being cut, he accepted a reduced salary in March 2010. He was then traded to Seattle for an undisclosed 2011 draft pick. Max Jean-Gilles and Nick Cole started the other fourteen games at right guard.
Reid’s creation of a comfortable environment for Shawn Andrews did not end with the signing of the player’s brother. A week before the 2009 draft, the Eagles traded their first and sixth round picks for Jason Peters, Shawn’s college roommate. Peters had gone undrafted in 2004, but had worked his way onto the Buffalo Bills’ roster and had been selected to the Pro Bowl following both the 2007 and 2008 seasons. Peters had been involved in a contract dispute with the Bills for a year, which is why he was available. After the trade, the Eagles signed him to a six year, $60 million deal. Although he was selected to three consecutive Pro Bowls—he was voted as the NFC’s starting left tackle after his first season as an Eagle—Peters’ play has been inconsistent since he became a starter in the league. In 2008, Peters led the league by allowing 11.5 sacks, despite playing only thirteen games. In Peters’ first year as an Eagle, he was rated the worst starting left tackle in the NFL by Football Outsiders. I don’t think you’d find many Eagle fans who would disagree with that assessment. Peters started every game at left tackle for the Eagles in 2009. He is still the starter at that position.
As poorly as Reid’s acquisitions of Shawn Andrews’ brother and college roommate turned out, Shawn’s situation ended up worse. His back never felt good enough to allow him onto the football field in 2009. The Eagles released him in March 2010. Since Shawn was unable to play, Winston Justice was the Eagles’ starting right tackle throughout the entire 2009 season.
Todd Herremans was slated to start at left tackle in 2009. He missed the season’s first five games due to a stress fracture. When he returned, he started at that position. Nick Cole started at left guard during Herremans’ absence. When Herremans was healthy enough to play, Cole took over at right guard for Max Jean-Gilles, who is more of a run blocker than a pass blocker.
Until tearing his ACL in the fifteenth game of the season, Jamaal Jackson started at center. Although he was never drafted, Jackson is a very good NFL center. In my opinion, he is one of the top three or four centers in the NFC. The problem is that Andy Reid and the Eagles have never acquired a legitimate center to back up Jackson. After Jackson injured his knee, Nick Cole took over as starting center in the final game of the regular season and the wild card game. Both of those games were road games against the Cowboys. The Cowboys recorded four sacks in each of those games. The Eagles weren’t able to run the ball in either contest. Jay Ratliff, the Cowboy nose tackle who always abuses the Eagles, looked like Joe Greene against Nick Cole. The poor offensive line play was the primary reason the Eagles managed to score only fourteen points combined in the two games.
Actually, the offensive line was responsible for a lot that went bad for the Eagles last season. I already explained how the players on the line were put together. Let me now look at them as a unit. The Eagles’ 2009 starting offensive lines broke down like this (from left tackle to right tackle):
Jason Peters, Nick Cole, Jamaal Jackson, Stacy Andrews, Winston Justice – 1 game (Game 1)Including the playoff game against Dallas, the Eagles had 85 starts on the offensive line. 17 of those starts were made by a player drafted in the second round. 20 starts were made by players drafted in the fourth round. The remaining 48 starts were recorded by players who were not drafted. Granted, two of the three undrafted players who started on the offensive line were Jason Peters and Jamaal Jackson, who have played at a very high level in the NFL. But Peters has severely regressed since having an excellent year in 2007. The other undrafted starter was Nick Cole, who is serviceable. Cole is mediocre, at best. The second round pick is Justice. While Justice is not as bad as he was in that infamous start against the Giants, he is another mediocre, at best, lineman. True, the Eagles expected Shawn Andrews to start; he would have been the only first round pick on the line. So the line the Eagles put together included one first rounder, a bad second rounder, and a bunch of fourth rounders and undrafted free agents.
Jason Peters, Nick Cole, Jamaal Jackson, Max Jean-Gilles, Winston Justice – 4 games (Game 2-5)
Jason Peters, Todd Herremans, Jamaal Jackson, Nick Cole, Winston Justice – 9 games (Games 6-8, 10-15)
Todd Herremans, Nick Cole, Jamaal Jackson, Stacy Andrews, Winston Justice – 1 game (Game 9)
Jason Peters, Todd Herremans, Nick Cole, Max Jean-Gilles, Winston Justice – 2 games (Game 17, Wild Card Playoff)
How does Andy Reid expect to have a credible offensive line when he’s building the unit with players no one expected to be good? The success of the Eagles’ offensive line is based on getting lucky with unheralded players. That is no way to plan for winning. While it is true that drafting is an inexact science, players are drafted in the first and second round for a reason. Andy Reid does not seem to understand this. If he did, he would have learned from the mistake of 2009 and built a better offensive line for 2010.
In the offseason, the Eagles did not sign any offensive linemen who were projected to make the two-deep depth chart. They went into the draft with thirteen picks—they drafted zero offensive linemen. Think about this: the offensive line was a disaster last season, especially in the final two games against the rival Dallas Cowboys, yet the Eagles did not add a single offensive lineman.
Furthermore, although Jackson tore his ACL two days after Christmas 2009, the Eagles expected him to be fully recovered by the start of the 2010 season; therefore, they signed no true backup center. Unlike Stacy Andrews the year before, Jackson actually was healthy enough to play at the start of this season. Unfortunately, he tore his right biceps in the season opener against Green Bay and will miss the rest of the season. This time, Mike McGlynn, a fourth round pick in the 2008 draft who played tackle in college, took over Jackson’s starting center spot.
I understand that teams can’t really afford to sign backups who only play center. At the same time, I think it behooves every team to have at least one reserve offensive lineman who has played center before. Two seasons in a row, the Eagles have cost themselves by not having a credible center to take over after Jamaal Jackson was injured.
The offensive line in general is just terrible. Barring more injuries, the Eagles’ starting offensive line for the rest of the season will be (from left tackle to right tackle) Jason Peters, Todd Herremans, Mike McGlynn, Nick Cole, and Winston Justice. Awful. Through three games this year, they have already allowed fourteen sacks—who knows how many sacks they would have given up if not for Vick’s superior mobility—despite playing two of those games against Detroit and Jacksonville (by contrast, the Eagles three opponents this year have recorded a total of twelve sacks in their five other games). This line was a problem last year and the Eagles have done absolutely nothing to make it better this year.
This also explains how and why this is the second year in a row that the Eagles’ starting quarterback suffered an injury in the opening game. Yes, McNabb suffered in injury in 2009 Week 1 that forced him to not play in Weeks 2 and 3. Kevin Kolb was concussed in Week 1 this season and missed Week 2 due to that injury.
If we’ve learned nothing since 1999, it is that Andy Reid does not learn well. This offensive line does not seem likely to improve in 2011. Very strange for a team coached by a man who has spent the majority of his life on the offensive line.
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