Sometime after McNabb's triumphant phone call, and Buckin' Aikman's bizarre grudge against the coming of 20th century telecommunications, or else any semblance of lightheartedness regarding a moment of gleeful exuberance, I found myself sitting on a couch, looking outside, a dumb little grin on my face, considering the world almost wholly anew. What a bright and beautiful world this is, when redemption can come so sweetly, when you hope for a thing so badly for so long, when, even as you cease to believe, you find a way through all the vagaries of life, of the NFC East, to see, clearly, a path to what you seek. I am blindsided by this. I keep knocking on wood, looking for the stains under carpets, looking the gift horse in the mouth, wondering where the anvil is lurking. But I can't seem to find anything.
I tried to explain this to my girlfriend. My girlfriend who occasionally wonders why "association football" is called soccer here. I tell her: "Katie, the Eagles are playing a team they crushed on Thanksgiving in the NFC Championship game." Katie replies: "That's great. How many wins before they get to the Super Bowl." Aaargh. I keep trying to explain the idea of conferences to her. Oh well. Even she can't believe that the Eagles are this close. "But wasn't the quarterback almost finished just a couple of months ago?" She gets some stuff right, does Katie.
The funny thing about all this is that it scarcely makes sense to me, either. A month ago, this state of affairs, the Eagles just one very manageable win away from the Superbowl, would have sounded ridiculous. But now? One reliable constant of football, over the years, has been the presence of some monolithic great team. Some team that was solid, that had guards at the door. Some team you really had to be special to beat. There were the Niners, the Cowboys, the Rams, the Pats. This year, that team went down with Tom Brady's knees, to the unending delight of everyone who feels that the word "door" ought to have an "r" sound in it. I remember telling Katie this, all the way back in August, that this was an opportunity for everyone else, not really thinking of the Eagles as being in that category. But now? Opportunity is knocking on the Eagles' door with both fists, hammering to be let in. This is the year, this is the moment.
Over the course of the next week, there will be an ample amount of commentary proclaiming the fact that Arizona played very badly on Thanksgiving, that they had no time to prepare for the game, that they just didn't show up, that they will most certainly show up for the next game. All of this is obviously true, and the Eagles must not look past their very talented opponents, or Kurt Warner will turn around and bite the Eagles in the ass faster than you can distract him with Bingo, shuffleboard and other things more appropriate for hobbling old men. Having said all of that, this upcoming game in the desert really ought to be a much easier game than the behemoth grudgematch in those Meadowy lands of Jersey. Correct me if I'm wrong here, but wasn't "No Country for Old Men" set in country that could well have been in Arizona, rather than west Texas? I'm just saying.
The Cardinals are coming off of a big win, having handily knocked off Carolina, the number 2 seed in the NFC. This was most certainly a big deal, and I was personally thrilled to see it. I would much rather go through the Cardinals than the Panthers. Having said that, these two teams, the Cardinals and the Panthers, are both soft seeds. They are very much overrated, according to the BCS formula, or would be if they were seeded that way. They have not proven themselves to be winners against good teams. One of the several wonderful things about the NFC East is the abundance of challenging games, of really tough matchups that really test your team and force you to prove yourself from Week 1. The flip side of this, of course, is the fact that the Eagles nearly missed the playoffs this year, due to the really tough regular season schedule, with New York and Dallas twice, and the Redskins no slouches either. But I digress.
The Panthers and Cardinals did not have this problem. The Cardinals, whose ridiculous division features the Niners, Seahawks and Rams, had the weakest conference schedule in ages. Their two best wins of the regular season, against (get this) Buffalo and Dallas, came in mid-october, and came after a) Knocking Trent Edwards out of the game, and b) blocking a punt, after having almost giftwrapped the game for Dallas. In other regular-season news, they were torched by Tavaris Jackson and his assorted cast of hoodlums, before being creamed by New England. (When you are lit up by Tavaris Jackson and Matt Cassel in back to back weeks, something is wrong with your secondary. Write that down.) The Panthers won against San Diego before the Chargers turned things around, split with the Falcons, beat the Cardinals, Bucs and Packers, and that's about it. These aren't very convincing wins. In the playoffs, the Cardinals beat a rookie QB and an incredibly shaky QB, and chewed up yards with the thoroughly over-the-hill Edge James. Call me crazy, but none of this really impresses me. Mcnabb is neither young nor shaky. The Eagles' LBs will haul down the Edge like so much dead old meat. Are the Cardinals a playoff team? Yes. A Super Bowl team? Not at all.
I know the Eagles lost to the Redskins twice, lost to the Bears, goddamned tied the Bengals, but you know what? Football can be a chancy game, things can bounce strangely, breaks can go against you, Quarterbacks can forget the rules. We don't like to talk about luck, but if you look back at the year, the only game we could not have won easily was the Baltimore game. Think about that. There was only one game all season where, at the end of the day, you couldn't honestly look in the mirror and wish things had turned out differently. The reason we were getting so frustrated, all along, was that we knew that these boys had talent, that they were good, but they couldn't go for the jugular. They couldn't close teams out, they couldn't play good fourth quarters.
All that is changed now. The Eagles, though still frustratingly imperfect in the red zone, prone to sputtering on offense, look good. They look commanding. They look like world-beaters, to me. Of the other three teams, they've beaten two. Knowing that, knowing that McNabb is still more than pissed about the benching, in the Ravens game, knowing that he might get a shot at redemption, isn't there a lot to look forward to here? I can't wait to see this all unfold.
I will tell you this. As we all advance in years, as our lives come to be more about what has already happened that what might yet happen, as we look back across the sweep of our lives and find the good and bad nuggets that our Eagles have left us, we will remember these next three weeks. We will remember them for their hope. Whether we will remember them also for their joy, or for their pain, is in the hands of McNabb, of Westbrook, of Dawk, of Samuel. If we can extrapolate anything here, it is this: That's a hell of a lot better than Allstate.
It may be a symptom of my checking out early (and we're talking about October) on the NFL season this year, but my overwhelming sense about this whole playoff thing is that everything is coming down to freak chance more than anything else. You can write a nice little Eagles redemption story (though I would argue the period of discontent was a lot of overhyped malarkey anyway and the Eagles were the same Eagles they've been for ten years; give or take a few seasons based on McNabb's health--an argument for another day) but I the narratives don't make sense to me. This year's NFL playoffs seem much more like a Madden franchise mode come true.
You know, dissapointingly the colts will have lost because they weirdly traded Freeney for Jay Cutler (who spends the whole game on the bench anyway) and Manning's passes kept getting intercepted by someone announced as player number 25. Your 15-1 team starts the conference championship game badly because you spilled a drink and gave up a kick off return.
Maybe it's just me. Maybe it's just watching the Ravens and Titans battling tooth and nail in purple and teal; the Cardinals doing well, too. It's all so... fake. And the NFL, with it's damnable parity and low sample sizes encourages all this, manufactures obligatory product without history or merit. It took the Bulls three tries to overcome the Pistons, the Packers three at least three to deal with the niners and cowboys... This year's model just has the benefit of a human player who knows exactly where all the blitzes are coming from on this difficulty level.
That said, a Steelers-Eagles superbowl would be awful nice.
Posted by: Andrew J Scanlan | January 13, 2009 at 04:42 AM