Skinned Alive

Did you see this coming? I confess that I did not. I looked past this game. I really did. I looked at the redskins and saw a pushover, a team that had self-destructed and quit on their coach, a team full of guys who were admittedly overpaid and underperforming, players who look at the world crumbling around them and demand the ball more, all of them led by a man who, with nothing else left, threw his arms up and proclaimed, a touch overdramatically, that he was the worst coach in the world. I saw a team ripe for the picking. I saw a little speed bump on the way to the big, titanic clash of D-Day. I could smell it, I could feel it coming, I could nearly taste it. I was, of course, wrong.

There were signs that this was coming. There always are. The Eagles, for as soundly as they beat the Browns last week, never hit the jugular, in fact looked like second-rate hit men stabbing the body in all of the wrong places, getting blood everywhere, never dispatching the victim, just making the whole thing ugly. After seeing Tom Hanks' "Road to Perdition," I remember sitting, gazing up at the screen, watching the credits roll by, then seeing a casting credit for "The Living Corpse." This is as fitting a description of the Browns as I can offer. Playing such opponents, the Eagles did not look good at all. There was the debacle at the end of the first half, the poorly-run 2-minute drill leading to the pick 6. There was the sluggishness of the second half. The Eagles were not crisp. But I discounted these signs, reasoning that the Eagles had sunk to the level of their opponent. I thought they would rise to the occasion when they needed to. But I was wrong. I should have known. I should have known.

The sloppy play of yesterweek plagued the Eagles once more. They were not awful. The defense played very well, in fact. But there was a key ingredient that is common to contending teams that the Eagles just didn't have. This inability to capture big moments, to play with crisply efficient urgency and to make decisive plays in decisive moments, has forever been the bane of this team. The problems of this period in the Eagles' history are many. The Eagles have trouble on third and short, trouble in the Red Zone, trouble with the 2-minute drill, problems with defending short passes or hard runs on third and short, suffer from a general lack of imaginative solutions to problems, play with a certain fussy coyness when presented with those intractable obstacles that cannot be passed or screened around, and they suffer from an unwillingness to go balls out to pound through the other team; these problems are all related to the overriding frustration that the Eagles have always had trouble playing with balls rather than brains.

Football is not, at heart, a cerebral game. Sure, the NFL is rife with sophisticated defensive schemes, camouflaged coverages, offensive smoke screens and the occasional trick play, but the grit of the game involves muscle, hard work, an intense desire to beat one's opponent, and the determination to do so. The sport is gladiatorial, not balletic. Andy Reid's origins as a lineman belie his overly-cerebral approach to the game. When given third-and-short, or fourth-and-goal, Reid usually dumps the ball off, or takes the field goal, rather than let his offensive line attack the line of scrimmage, allow Westbrook or (remember him?) Dorsey Levens, both of whom are excellent at this, find a hole and get the yard.

If I know anything about football, I know this: if your offensive line cannot get a push to run the ball, even when the other team, all the fans, the pigeons flying overhead, and even Joe Buck know what's coming, if you cannot get that yard running the ball when you absolutely need it, you do not deserve to win the game. This should be a rule of the game. There is no purer test in football than short-yardage situations. Can you think of a Super Bowl-winning team that could not get that yard? Let me know if you can, but I doubt it.

Watching the perfectly-thrown lob from McNabb sail through DeShaun Jackson's fingertips, I has the familiar sinking, enraged feeling that I have had on innumerable occasions in the past. When the Eagles played their last football game at the Vet, in the 2002 NFC Championship game, they opened up with a 20-yard TD run by Duce Staley, then frittered away the rest of the game unable to move the chains, and unwilling to pund away with Staley, even as Simeon Rice ran rings around the tackles. A year later, McNabb was picked off 3 times by Ricky Manning Jr. when all they needed to do to go to the Super bowl was to beat the freaking Panthers. It was snowing like cats and dogs that day, the wind was swirling, but again Reid would not run the ball. They were so close. They were close in the Super Bowl, but could not mount a winning drive. They were close in New Orleans, but they couldn't quite do it, and Reid chickened out on fourth and 15. After Sheldon Brown's HUGE hit on Reggie Bush in the opening minutes, there were few inspiring things that happened for the Eagles in that game, after such a wonderful late-season surge to get there. We should be conditioned to this, now, in Pavlovian fashion, that when the Eagles manage to excite you, THAT is when they lose.

Look, I know that the short-yardage situation is not really number one on the long list of things that are wrong with this team. I just think that it is the most revealing. Andy Reid is a control freak. He wants to control the passing game, he wants to control the running game, and the ratio betwixt them. He (presumably) wants to control his weight, and his sons. But look around. He is not in control of any of these things. He's bowed to popular pressure about running the ball. The wide receivers are, essentially, people he met at a pickup game. Westbrook is seldom allowed to be the disruptive, quicksilver player he might be. His sons are headed to jail.

While a football team is not a democracy, there is no longer any case to be made that all things the Eagles do must be done under Reid's aegis. The playcalling duties have long since devolved to Marty Morninwheg. Things have improved, but not that much. The Eagles need to find a way to get better. That the ball went through Jackson's hands is, in and of itself, an unfortunate missed opportunity. That this opportunity followed an even worse drop, that the drops came in an absolutely crucial game, makes it inexcusable. That the Eagles had no better option, that they had played poorly yet were still within reach of the game in no way mitigates these facts. The team was not ready to play, and the fault for that lies squarely at Reid's door. I don't know what else to say. The might still make the playoffs, but this seems unlikely. My thoughts are now mostly for next year. Merry Christmas.