Game 8 Thoughts

Eagles epilogue:

Drops and dumb-ass penalties. Has this mediocre and boring team finally stopped listening to Andy Reid? What does today's performance tell us about the coach's ability to motivate? What does it tell us about the character of the team's key players?

Bad loss. Bad season.

well that about sums it up, doesn't it? going in, i thought this game was going to be tough for the eagles to win, even with their "a" game, because the jaguars are a team that matches up well with the birds. this jaguars team is designed to beat finesse teams like the eagles with their power running game, two gap d-linemen, and good secondary. still, i figured with with the season on the line, this team would come out fired up and meet the challenge. dead wrong.

a loss today would not necessarily have doomed the season. yes, a loss does make the playoffs a much longer shot (would likely need to go at least 6-2 in the second half to sniff the playoffs), but given that the eagles, by visual and statisical measures, were the better team on the field in all of their games coming into this one, i was prepared for the possibility of an "l" in this spot. the jags are a damn good team. an inconsistent one, but a good, fundamentally sound team nonetheless.

what i was not prepared for was the lifeless, pathetic, and careless manner in which the eagles came out to play this game. i think whoever wrote the above passage (bumble i am assuming) hits on probably the key issue in my mind -- has the team tuned out andy reid? it's obviously a big problem if it has. andy has never been one to motivate his team -- he counts on his players to be professionals (i.e. "self motivating"), and by and large, he counts on his veterans to do the policing -- however, he usually has been very good at preparing the team to play and "circling the wagons" when the team was facing adversity. there were plenty of indications of this -- his record coming off a loss has been excellent, the way he got the team to deal with and overcome injuries, the way he got the team to rebound in 2003 after the horrible 0-2 start, etc.

from my outsider's point of view, andy has always appeared to employ the "carrot" much more often than the "stick". he sets the expectation of success and then he tells them that he believes they can do it. in general, this has worked for him. while others (e.g. parcells, belichick, coughlin) use a much more "hard coaching" style, andy chose the softer more positive approach.

unfortunately, what i'm seeing is that this softer approach doesn't seem to be working on this team right now. why, i'm not sure. could he have lost the respect of the locker room based on how he handled/didn't handle the me-o situation? could the loss of critical leadership mass (vincent, hugh, ike, chad lewis) finally be catching up to this team? could the character of this team just not be good right now?

i was going to post this as a separate topic and discussion, and i probably still will because there is a lot of good information in there, but it seems to be very appropriate here as well. michael lewis (of moneyball and blind side fame) writes a very insightful article (no surprise) in today's new york times. the topic is a week with bill parcells, but i imagine a lot of what parcells was feeling and thinking is very applicable to big red right now.

here are some relevant excerpts:

What has him troubled — what has him waking up choking on his bile — isn’t what you might expect. It’s not concern that the Redskins’ coaching staff could spring something on the Cowboys for which they are entirely unprepared. And it’s not his team’s raw ability. It’s a thing that’s harder to put into words, and impervious to strategy. Even as he is trying to study his next opponent, he can’t shake what happened on Sunday. How his team, the moment the Jaguars pushed back, collapsed. How, the moment the players felt the pressure, they began to commit penalties and the sort of small but critical mental errors that only a coach watching video can perceive. In their performance he smells the sort of failure he defines himself against.

It’s an elemental thing — that mysterious something in a player under pressure that either snaps or holds — and elemental things are what interest this old coach. Golfers with the yips, big-league catchers whose careers end when they find themselves suddenly unable to throw the ball back to the pitcher — these he understands. He was in the stands during a spring-training baseball game when the St. Louis Cardinals tried to bring back their mentally broken young pitcher, Rick Ankiel — and watched Ankiel throw the ball over the catcher’s head, several times. “Ian Baker Finch!” Parcells exclaims, once he has warmed to the subject. “Ian Baker Finch won the British Open. Two years later he couldn’t hit a golf ball with a golf club.” Fear of failure can infect the mind and turn sport into a kind of walking death. “If you can find a solution to that problem,” he tells me, “quit writing. You’d make a fortune. You got all these sports psychologists. None of them can help these guys.”

Among the papers is an anecdote Parcells brings up often in conversation, about a boxing match that took place nearly 30 years ago between the middleweights Vito Antuofermo and Cyclone Hart. Parcells loves boxing; his idea of a perfect day in the off-season is to spend it inside some ratty boxing gym in North Jersey. “It’s a laboratory,” he says. “You get a real feel for human behavior under the strongest duress — under the threat of physical harm.” In this laboratory he has identified a phenomenon he calls the game quitter. Game quitters, he says, seem “as if they are trying to win, but really they’ve given up. They’ve just chosen a way out that’s not apparent to the naked eye. They are more concerned with public opinion than the end result.”

Parcells didn’t see the Hart-Antuofermo fight in person but was told about it, years ago, by a friend and boxing trainer, Teddy Atlas. It stuck in his mind and now strikes him as relevant. Seated, at first, he begins to read aloud from the pages: how in this fight 29 years ago Hart was a well-known big puncher heavily favored against the unknown Vito Antuofermo, how Hart knocked Antuofermo all over the ring, how Antuofermo had no apparent physical gifts except “he bled well.” “But,” Parcells reads, “he had other attributes you couldn’t see.” Antuofermo absorbed the punishment dealt out by his natural superior, and he did it so well that Hart became discouraged. In the fifth round, Hart began to tire, not physically but mentally. Seizing on the moment, Antuofermo attacked and delivered a series of quick blows that knocked Hart down, ending the fight.

The Redskins video is still frozen on the screen behind Parcells. He is no longer sitting but is now on his feet. “This is the interesting part,” he says, then reads:

“When the fighters went back to their makeshift locker rooms, only a thin curtain was between them. Hart’s room was quiet, but on the other side he could hear Antuofermo’s cornermen talking about who would take the fighter to the hospital. Finally he heard Antuofermo say, ‘Every time he hit me with that left hook to the body, I was sure I was going to quit. After the second round, I thought if he hit me there again, I’d quit. I thought the same thing after the fourth round. Then he didn’t hit me no more.’

“At that moment, Hart began to weep. It was really soft at first. Then harder. He was crying because for the first time he understood that Antuofermo had felt the same way he had and worse. The only thing that separated the guy talking from the guy crying was what they had done. The coward and the hero feel the same emotions. They’re both human.”

When Parcells finishes, he says: “This is the story of our last game. We were Cyclone Hart.”

well, the andy reid eagles used to be vito antuofermo (especially during the early years). i remember lamenting at the time, that the eagles won by waiting for the other team to make mistakes and they didn't seem to make dynamic plays to win. they just waited for the other guy to lose. now that this eagles vintage appears to be cyclone hart, how i wish for those boring teams.

today's game was almost exactly like the 2003 nfc championship game against carolina in style, substance, and result. today, the jaguars showed no respect to the eagles, and the eagles folded like a cheap suit.

biggest problems i saw:

- the jags played press coverage on the receivers all day. they showed no respect for the eagles receiving corps and boy did it pay off for them. since no receiver made any plays today (heck we were in the third quarter before a wideout even caught a stinking pass), the jags definitely made the right call. the young receiving corps did not get open very much today, and when they did, they dropped the ball. repeatedly. like they never saw a football before in their lives. it was sad.

- since the jags were playing man coverage in the secondary, that should have left them vulnerable to the run. unfortunately, their massive two-gap d-linemen ate our o-line today. the jackson 5 didn't know what to do with themselves. they certainly were not ready to handle the physical challenge that jags presented. no wonder they kept false starting. when you keep getting punched in the face, flinching is inevitable. sadly, they didn't (or worse) couldn't punch back.

- don lost faith in the receiving corps after reggie brown's drop on the first play of the game. that's a big problem.

- the middle of the jags line (meester and the two samoans) *dominated* the d-tackles. darwin walker was either playing without much discipline or he was getting manhandled and thrown sideways on every run, truck driver was a non-factor, and bunkley appears to be a bust. even mike patterson was getting blown off the line.

- broderick bunkley appears to be a bust. here is what i wrote when the eagles drafted him:

personally, i'm not as high on bunkley as all the experts are, but if they think he's good and big red thinks he's good, then he's good enough for me. i saw florida state play a couple of times this year and didn't think bunkley was all that impressive -- plus he was well-nigh invisible in the orange bowl. that could have been due to double teaming though as i definitely was not focusing on him.

the guy i'm seeing on the field is the guy i saw at the orange bowl against penn state. a non-factor.

very difficult to win if you can't control either line of scrimmage. what a miserable f'n game. what a miserable two weeks it's going to be.