The Gold Standard: Defending Eagle Fans

Sunday, as the Eagles lost to the Packers to open the season, Twitter was bombarded by people sarcastically asking Eagle fans if they were sorry yet for wishing Donovan McNabb away. I tried arguing with some of them for a while. I knew, however, that it was a useless effort. The national perception will be what it will be. But the truth is that, while Eagle fans in Philadelphia had grown weary and tired of their quarterback, only a minute minority considered him the team’s biggest problem. Many thought it was time for him to go—how many times can you continue to try the same thing before realizing that it’s just not working?—but there were also many who thought that it was Andy Reid, not Donovan McNabb, whose time with the Eagles should have ended. Nationally, McNabb has always been portrayed as the fans’ fall guy. That was never the truth. It was never that simple. Besides, at no point during his tenure in Philadelphia was McNabb ever the top target of the fans’ ire. Not once.

McNabb was always the nationally publicized face of the fans’ frustration because he was the quarterback. When the team has a winning record and one is not physically in the area talking to local people, listening to local talk shows, and reading local newspapers and websites, it is very difficult for one to pick up dissatisfaction with a team’s front office. But rest assured, most Eagle fans are fed up with the Andy Reid—Joe Banner—Jeffrey Lurie triumvirate.

Lurie, the team owner, and Banner, the team president, spent much of the time from 2000-2005 speaking of the Eagles as the “gold standard” of NFL franchises. Yes, “gold standard,” was their phrase. This irked the team’s fans to no end. Rightfully, the fans wondered how the Eagles could be the gold standard without having any Lombardi trophies to showcase. Even if none of them were, at the time, recently won, each of the Eagles’ division rivals has won multiple Super Bowls. The Eagles still have zero. At no point have Lurie and Banner acted as if increasing that total is a priority.

It is true that only one team can win the Super Bowl each year, but the goal of a professional sports team is to be that team. Every action of the organization should be to get the team closer to winning that Lombardi trophy. Sometimes that means signing a free agent; sometimes that means gutting the team and starting over. It should never mean watching the team get close every year and doing nothing to change the personnel or philosophy.

I often speak of the concept of not allowing being very good to prevent you from being great. The Eagles, as an organization, do not subscribe to that philosophy. They feel their decade was better than the Ravens, Buccaneers, and Giants. I don’t understand this. The fans don’t understand this. The goal is winning the Super Bowl. Those three teams won the Super Bowl; the Eagles did not. This does not seem to bother the Eagle management.

Naturally, most of the fans don’t like this. They want to win a Super Bowl. They see that winning the championship is more important to them than it is to their team’s management, and it frustrates them to no end. They wonder how the “gold standard” can be satisfied going year after year without accomplishing the ultimate goal.

It is easy for the national media to come into the city and cast the fans’ disgruntlement with Lurie and Banner as typical Philly fan behavior. They can shrug it off as fans not knowing how good they have it. They never identify it for what it actually is, though: Philadelphia fans are sick and tired of Eagle ownership being content and satisfied with merely getting close every year. So that story is never reported. People outside the Philadelphia metropolitan area never learn how disgusted the fans in the city are with Banner and Lurie.

Shortly after Lurie and Banner took over the team, the Cowboys won the NFC East’s ninth Lombardi trophy. During the Lurie era, the Giants added a tenth. Every NFC East team other than the Eagles has won at least three Super Bowls. The cross-state rival Steelers have won six, including two in the past half-dozen years. Meanwhile, the USFL’s Stars are the only professional football team in Philadelphia to win a championship since 1960. That’s right: the Eagles wore throwback uniforms in the 2010 season opener to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the team’s most recent championship.

While Lurie has owned the team, the Buccanneers, Panthers, and Cardinals have all reached the Super Bowl for the only time in franchise history by defeating the Eagles in the NFC Championship Game. The two sorriest franchises in NFL history, the Bucs and Saints, have won the Super Bowl. This most recent decade featured the Red Sox, White Sox, and Phillies winning the World Series. Those three teams have all been around since 1901, yet had combined to win exactly one World Series between 1918 and 2000. The Chicago Blackhawks won the Stanley Cup for the first time since 1961.

Eagle fans are still waiting for their championship. Lurie and Banner, though, are content. The fans in the city have been frustrated with Banner and Lurie long before they grew tired of Donovan McNabb. Even during McNabb’s darkest days with the Eagles, the fans desired Banner and Lurie’s departure more than they did the quarterback’s. After all, Banner and Lurie are the ones who continually allow Andy Reid to stay in town and do what he does.

Andy Reid. Oh, man, are the fans ready for that man to go.

Reid is the man who consistently wastes timeouts because the coaching staff takes too much time signaling plays into the quarterback.


• Reid is the man who replaced Jeremiah Trotter with Levon Kirkland in 2002. Kirkland is the man largely responsible for being too slow to respond to Joe Jurevicius’ infamous 71-yard catch & run in the NFC Championship Game loss against Tampa Bay. Kirkland was replaced by Mark Simoneau in 2003. Every Eagle fan remembers DeShaun Foster running over Simoneau twice on the same 5-yard touchdown run in that season’s NFC Championship Game. It doesn’t seem like much of a coincidence that the Eagles finally made the Super Bowl when Trotter returned in 2004.
  
  
• It was Andy Reid who has become legendary for clock mismanagement. He even started 2010 off by burning his second half timeouts at the wrong time, even though his clock management against Oakland in 2009 will be the standard for all future clock management blunders. After failing to convert a fourth down, the Eagles trailed the Raiders 13-9. Oakland took possession at their own 44-yard line with 2:42 left in the game. The Eagles had two timeouts remaining. Reid called the Eagles’ second timeout after the Raiders’ first play. 2:10 remained. Then, with 2:02 left on the clock, Reid burned the team’s final timeout after the Raiders lost two yards on second down. He should have let those two seconds run off the clock to bring up the two-minute warning. By calling the timeout, Reid gave the Raiders the option of throwing the ball on 3^rd & 10—the Raiders had no fear of stopping the clock with an incomplete pass because the upcoming two-minute warning was going to stop the clock anyway. Had Reid saved the timeout, the Raiders would have run the ball on 3^rd & 10, which would have pretty much guaranteed the Eagles of forcing a punt and getting the ball back. Since the Eagles gave Oakland the option of throwing the ball, the Raiders threw the ball and picked up the first down. Three kneel downs later, the game was over and the Eagles were beaten by JaMarcus Russell.
  
  
• Reid is the one who gave his young quarterback such wonderful weapons as Charles Johnson, Torrance Small, and the unforgettable Trash & Stinkson (so named by Michael Irvin on ESPN) combo. Pinkston, you’ll remember, not only punked out against Ricky Manning, Jr. during the NFC Championship Game against the Panthers, but also inspired the legendary Joe Theismann quote, “You've heard of alligator arms; this is alligator body. Todd Pinkston has got a touchdown. Watch this: he now sees the safety coming from the left, that ball's in the air, he just, he does not want to get hit.”
  
  
• Reid is the offensive guru who drafted Freddie Mitchell when Reggie Wayne and Chad Johnson were still on the board.
  
  
• Reid is the coach who started Hank Fraley for five consecutive years even though he was never able to handle a nose tackle. Fraley’s inadequacies against nose tackles was a major factor in the Eagles losing record against teams with 3-4 defenses during his time as a starter, including Super Bowl XXXIX. While Deion Branch was the MVP of that Super Bowl and I thought Tedy Bruschi actually deserved the award, Vince Wilfork truly was the best player on the field that day. Fraley’s inability to block Wilfork was the biggest reason that, outside of one 22-yard run, the Eagles ran for 23 yards on 16 carries that day.
  
  
• Reid is the one who put together the roster that began the 2007 season without a player who had ever returned a punt in the NFL. Not so coincidentally, two different Eagles fumbled punt returns that day. One was recovered for a Packer touchdown; the Packers recovered the other, drove 6 yards, and kicked a field goal as time expired—Green Bay won 16-13.
  
  
• Reid is man who tried to help Shawn Andrews’ depression in 2009 by signing and trading for his brother and college roommate, respectively. The brother, Stacy Andrews, was benched after the first game of the season and traded away two weeks ago. The roommate, Jason Peters, was acquired for first and fourth round draft picks. While he made the 2009 Pro Bowl, he led the Eagles in penalties, allowed seven sacks, and Football Outsiders had him rated as the worst starting left tackle in the NFL last season.
  
  
• Reid is the one who, coming off a Super Bowl appearance, allowed the Terrell Owens situation to deteriorate to the point that he felt compelled to get rid of a player who led the NFL in receiving yards and receiving touchdowns through seven games in 2005 (Owens had 154 yards in his final game as an Eagle). The Eagles, of course, lost eight of their final ten games that year to finish in last place.

Even though Super Bowl XXXIX was there for the taking, many Eagle fans still look at the NFC Championship Game in January 2003 as the one that got away. Everything was set up for them to win that game. It was a game they could not lose. During ESPN’s pre-game show, Sal Paolantonio reported that the Eagles knew they couldn’t lose that game. That game was to be the last ever in Veterans Stadium, and the Eagles were playing Tampa Bay that day. The Eagles had defeated the Bucs 21-3 in the 2000 playoffs and 31-9 in the 2001 playoffs. Both of those games, as well as a 20-10 Philly win during the 2002 regular season, were played at the Vet. Furthermore, the Eagles had won in Tampa in the final game of the 2001 regular season to force the ensuing playoff matchup to be played in Philadelphia. In short, that group of Eagles was 5-0 against that group of Buccaneers.

The Eagles also had the weather on their side that day. The game-time temperature was 27 degrees Fahrenheit. It was well-known that the Bucs had trouble in cold weather games. Until the final game of the 2002 regular season when they defeated a 4-11 Bears team Champaign that the franchise had ever won a game played when the game-time temperature was 40 degrees or less. Plus, the Bucs entered the NFC Championship Game having never won a playoff game on the road.

It was a game the Eagles could not lose unless the coaching staff did not keep them focused. After a long opening kickoff return followed by a Duce Staley touchdown on the second play from scrimmage, it seemed the Eagles were on their way to an easy victory and trip to San Diego for the Super Bowl. Then…they came unglued. The Eagles only score three more points on the day. Watching that game live—and I’ve watched it three times in the years since—it was clear that once Tampa Bay did not go away after that first touchdown, the Eagles did not know how to respond. They appeared unprepared to face a team that was going to actually try. They walked into the NFC Championship Game expecting a walkover. When the Buccaneers fought back, the Eagles did not know what to do. That’s on the coach. That happened on Andy Reid’s watch.

Eagle fans know all of this, and they’re tired of it. But all you’ll ever hear nationally is how they wanted Donovan McNabb gone. Come on, man.

That’s not to say the fans weren’t ready for McNabb’s departure. The fans were smart enough to know that trying to make an inaccurate, playmaking quarterback into a West Coast Offense quarterback was a bad fit. They were also knew that, after eleven years of watching him throw passes behind receivers and at their feet, his accuracy was not going to improve. They saw that movie many, many times; they knew the ending was not going to be watching the commissioner hand the Lombardi trophy to Jeffrey Lurie.

It’s true that McNabb was never going to win over all of the fans in the city. But he won most of them over. Most of the fans are adamant that he is the best quarterback in franchise history. As I suggested earlier, had it been put to ballot, McNabb would have stayed with the team and Andy Reid would have been the one packing his bags.

The fans are ready for Andy Reid to go. They are tired of him. They have zero belief in his ability to lead a team to a championship. They know this is not going to end well.

So when you hear the Eagle fans boo this season, don’t assume they are all directed at Kevin Kolb. Most of them are intended for the man on the sidelines and the two men up in the owner’s box. Be sure of that.