2010 Season Debate

I think there's 2 primary uncertainties facing the Eagles this year: 1) The play of Kolb and 2) The play of the defense as a whole. Both of these are fairly large question marks. Kolb's not played a whole lot and the defense was atrocious last year. OK, maybe they weren't that bad, but they were a decent way below average.

Kolb
I see this as the lower of 2 issues facing this team. This issue will get most of the play in the media because the QB position is always the out-sized focus and because the McNabb trade. But we've seen a bit of what he can do last year and he was at worst an average QB in his 3 games. 2-1 W-L, 4TDs vs. 3INT, 64% completion record, 7.7 yd/att, 148 yd/game. And this was in limited duty. I think over a full season he's likely to do better than these numbers given he's been running with the ones all off-season. Also, while the fans may not have seen a lot of him before, the coaching staff has seen him every day for 3 years now. Given how highly Reid values the QB position, there's NO WAY he's making this switch unless he's sure Kolb's going to be better than average.

Defense
I tried to pick a specific position/area of concern here, but I'm more worried about the whole than the individual positions. Maybe my concern is more about the D Coordinator. It just seems like the positions themselves have decent talent outside of LB, which is probably better than it has been in recent years. If everyone can stay healthy. They seemed to underperform their talent last year. Never able to get the stop they needed. And couldn't force nearly enough FG attempts. They didn't go out and get any real talent this off-season. Their coaching staff is still the same. So it's hard for me to see a big jump in improvement, which I think will be necessary to take some of the pressure of Kolb. While I think he's going to be decent, he'll be a lot better with a better defense.

Eagles tickets are here!

You know the season's about to start when the season tickets finally arrive. I have no idea why it takes them so long to get them mailed since they know about the games for like 6 months. Might be a way to deter counter fitting.

I am very disappointed they went with the fan pictures on the tickets as opposed to player/couch faces. Really? I don't follow the team because of the fans. Put the players' pictures on the tickets. And JJ should definitely have been on one of the tickets for crying out loud! A travesty in my opinion.

Reid vs. Banner

http://www.philly.com/philly/sports/eagles/20100718_Reid__Banner_give_Eagles_opposing_points_of_view.html?viewAll=y

I really liked this article. Not sure it matters who has the juice as long as the team's winning.

I also don't understand why everyone always has to agree with every decision. There's no way that's going to happen. It doesn't happen at work. It doesn't happen at home. There is NO relationship where the parties agree 100% of the time. The test of a strong relationship isn't whether or not there's disagreements, but how those disagreements are handled. As far as I can tell, the Eagles handle them in house and everyone buys into the final decision even if it's not exactly what they wanted. Sounds like a great relationship to me even if Reid and Banner don't pal around outside of the workplace.