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DEAR READERS,
If you’re used to getting my stories through links on Facebook, you may have noticed that I’m sort of quiet right now. That’s because FB has decided that my account needs I.D. verification, and they’ve suspended the account until they get it. So I’m in talks with them now to get the issue resolved. By “in talks” I mean that I’ve sent them two e-mails and the verification they requested, but I haven’t heard dick from them yet.
So I wait.
In the meantime if anyone asks you, “Hey, what’s up with Eagle Maniacal?” You now have an answer, and even a link to an explanation if they want one.
If it’s not resolved by Sunday, you can always look for me here.
LAST year the Eagles were running away with the division before we stumbled and ultimately fumbled the division away to a Cowboys team that was more lucky than good. The Cowchips finished 12-4 to our 10-6, but it would seem that no one has much respect for what they did last year, because everyone knows that it had more to do with us losing than it did with them winning. The Cowboys just aren’t good enough be this divisions stars.
The NFL has released the schedule, and on each team’s schedule page is a preview story with a headline. What’s funny is that taken together the Eagles headline make us look like the team that won last year, while the Cowboys headline suggests an almost remedial aspect to it. It seems that like me, the NFL knows the Cowboys are on the way down. (I made a point of leaving the address bars in the picture so you can go where I was and see what I saw.)
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that the Cowboys season last year was a fluke. In fact I think they went 12-4 partly because they played a smarter brand of football. It just wouldn’t have been good enough if we didn’t screw up near the end. They did enough to be in a position to get that lucky bounce when we gifted the division to them. However, the Cowboys have ripped out the engine that powered them, and now simply don’t have the parts to do what they need to, in order to win the East again.
I hope Cowboys fans enjoyed last year, because for them, it’s picnic time again.
YOU’VE read the reviews. Nothing left to do but make pick and tell you why.
Last year’s pick: PHILADELPHIA —– Last year’s WINNER: DALLAS —– My Record: 0-1
NOTE: Rookies don’t usually shake up this division, so there’s a pretty good chance that what you see here will be how it shakes out for the year.
Strongest Offense: DALLAS
Like the Giants they tick 3/5 boxes as far as positions being strong. However, unlike the Giants the Cowboys have an offensive line.
Weakest Offense: PHILADELPHIA
I know! I know! But we’re an offensive team! We’ve set records! Yeah, yeah, yeah. We’re also remodeling our Offensive Line, our QB situation is a toss-up, and we have ZERO explosive players at WR.
Strongest Defense: WASHINGTON
They have a nice front seven up there, but the secondary is an issue, However Secondary is a problem for every team in the division right now, so this was a pretty easy pick.
Weakest Defense: DALLAS
Greg Hardy may help this team, but there is a real lack of playmakers on this side of the ball.
Strongest Special Teams: PHILADELPHIA
Everyone has a decent Punter, and while I gave everyone but Philadelphia a passing grade at Kicker, it was by a razor thin margin and mostly on a technicality. On the other hand Philadelphia has a much better return game, and kick/punt coverage than any of our rivals
Weakest Special Teams: DALLAS
This was a toss-up between Washington and Dallas, but Dallas has lost their KR to New York, so they risk having some of their ST tenets stolen by a division rival.
Projected Winner: WASHINGTON
Bottom Line: While they still have offensive line issues, so do 3 out of 4 teams in the division. They also had issues in their Secondary, but so does every other team in the division. When you look at the parts that actually do work among the four teams, Washington can play defense as well as any team in the division right now. They can also run the ball, which is something that a couple teams in this division may have trouble doing themselves, given their offensive line issues and/or lackluster RB’s.
Philadelphia continues (so far) to hemorrhage more talent than we bring in, and Dallas has thrown away the straw that stirred their drink. As a result, both of these teams stand as weaker today than they were when their seasons ended. While New York has a downright scary looking offense returning, they’re doing it without an offensive line they can trust and a run game that’s more rumor than reality.
Heads up:
Philadelphia is rumored to be about to make some moves regarding not just the Draft, but the roster in general. If someone is to take the division from Washington, Philly is the team.
THE year was 1960. The place was Franklin Field in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Our Philadelphia Eagles defeated the visiting Green Bay Packers 17-13 to win the NFL Championship title in what would become the only playoff loss in the career of head coach Vince Lombardi.
It was the only time Lombardi would ever face us in the playoffs. He would die 0-1 and be (by some accounts) forever scarred by it.
Our rivals like to make sport of the fact that we don’t own a copy of the annual replica that bears Vince Lombardi’s name. They attempt to invalidate all that we have done by saying that we don’t own a Lombardi Trophy.
This is incorrect. We don’t own a Lombardi Trophy, we own THE Lombardi Trophy.
As in the man himself.
Better still, our ownership doesn’t have to be renewed year to year. We own him forever. Or least until he beats us in a playoff game. Like it or not it’s the truth.
At some point we’ll get around to winning one of those copies, and we’ll of course have a parade over it. Because on that day, we’ll own BOTH kinds of Lombardi, the one that passes from hand to hand, and the one that belongs to us and us alone.
YESTERDAY the NFL took a serious hit to its credibility when hours before the Lions/Cowboys kicked off, it was reported that the Head of NFL Officiating, Dean Blandino, was seen partying on the Dallas Cowboys bus. This is an old report, but still. There was no doubt going to be an inquiry into what he was doing there. It all could have very well turned out to be harmless.
But then there was that play.
Full disclosure: I did not watch the game. I was avoiding sports after learning of Stuart Scott’s passing, and instead decided to continue my personal ‘Breaking Bad’ marathon on Netflix. (And YES, I’m aware of the irony there.)
However, once I came out of my cocoon, it was impossible to escape the replay. If you were sitting anywhere near a screen, you couldn’t avoid it. At such a critical point in the game, to get a call wrong is bad enough. But picking up that flag was more than just wrong. It was a deliberate and blatant an act of sabotage.
To call that anything less than tampering is to deny what the entire world saw. Former-referee-turned-FOX-rules-expert Mike Pereira, has said that flag should not have been picked up. HOFer Warren Sapp (a proud Cowboys fan) described it on Twitter as “Home Cookin”. As you saw (if you clicked the link), Sapp wasn’t the only former player to make it known that he thought tampering had taken place.
The real issue here is the appearance of allowed impropriety by the NFL. Overwhelming public sentiment is that something shady happened, and that we all (figuratively speaking) saw it go down. Overwhelming public sentiment is that we all know who the culprits are, because we saw them commit the act. Who won or lost this single game, is immaterial. The public sentiment and trust in the NFL as an institution, is what is at stake here, and is what must be addressed.
If this was just one bad call, it would simply be a blown call; but the sheer blatant nature of the act, set against the backdrop of Blandino getting all cozy-cozy, nice-nice with the Cowboys…It looks bad. There’s prima facie here people. LOADS of it. On record and broadcasted nationally.
Sweeping this under the rug, won’t do. Waiting for it to blow over, won’t do. This one (like the blown Fail Mary call by replacement refs a couple years ago), is burned into our collective, public memory. And just like we’ll remember this for years to come, we’ll also remember if the NFL acts like nothing, specifically nothing wrong, happened.
TO be clear, I’ve lost one of my heroes today. This morning I learned that Stuart Scott, long-time sportscaster for ESPN had passed away. After 8 years of battling cancer on and off, he finally succumbed today at the too young age of 49.
I discovered Stuart Scott in my late teens. There was a period where things were thin and we couldn’t afford cable anymore. Not being from a sports family, I’d never bothered trying to watch ESPN before then. One day I had the idea to try an use the cable wire as an antenna to get picture as sharp as cable, so I ran the old cable wire into the IN on our living room VCR. Just to see if I could get anything. My younger brother sat by watching. And hoping.
We still had one of the old VCR’s that had the UHF/VHF/UF tuner gears, and I found if I twiddled with them I could get a weak signal through the VCR. I didn’t have to fish long before I got something. I twiddled more to get a better picture. What I ended up with was a few cable channels. They came in grainy and in black and white, but there they were.
And one of those channels was ESPN.
In my experience sportscasters were people like Big Al Meltzer and Howard Eskin. But ESPN had these guys Dan Patrick, Keith Olbermann. They also had this awesome duo of Rich Eisen and Stuart Scott. They transformed how I saw sports. The way they talked about it made me want to hear about it and learn about it.
They spoke about each sport like they were fans of it. If you did something awesome, they cheered it. If you got taken, they clowned you. Their delivery was as much about them and their take on the sport, as it was about the sport itself. I adopted the style of “This Is My Take” and now I tell my perspective even if the world disagrees. As a result, the duo of Eisen and Scott is in the DNA of every word you’ll ever read from me.
To be clear, I’ve lost one of my heroes today. Not only for the early days when I first stumbled across SportsCenter, but also for the way he continued to do what he loved even as he battled for his life. Thinking he’d beaten this thing and then having to do battle with it again.
In 2006 I lost my grandfather to cancer, it started in his lung and then went everywhere. In 2012 I lost a friend who was like a brother to me at the age of 34 to pancreatic cancer. That monster leaves its mark on survivors, but when it claims someone it’s nothing short of brutal as it takes people away from you a piece at a time. Reducing them to shadows before turning out the light. Yet Stuart battled it. He kept going. He kept living. He stayed as cool as the other side of the pillow.
And again, to be clear, I’ve lost one of my heroes today.
FOR those of us who’d wear an Eagles jersey to a Phillies game, there really is no offseason. You exist in one of two states: Either feasting on football or starving for it. We now will get months to lick clean the bones of “What went wrong”.
I love my Eagles. I think the world of them and so I expect much of them. When they fall short and fail to play up to their potential, I question why. I question who. I want heroes praised and bums shown the door. I want a team that’s at least as tough as me. I’m hard on my team, but if they’re strong enough, they can take it.
After a 9-3 start the Eagles went 10-6 again, but missed the playoffs this year. Some fans are going to say we should be happy about that, because we were 4-12 just two seasons ago. Then again most of those same fans will go dormant until the first preseason game. You know the type. They’ll talk of putting away their Eagles jersey and breaking out the Flyers one.
While many fans see 10-6, I see a 1-3 collapse down the stretch. I see a team that crumbled when the heat was turned up. I see players who don’t care if they come back; players who shouldn’t have to question if they’re coming back, who have no idea if they are; and I see an owner and a head coach offering no support for the return of a man who mere months ago was our future for 1,000 years.
Two consecutive 10-6 seasons would have most teams building around a solid foundation. Instead we seem to be disassembling ours. Two consecutive 10-6 seasons should mean looking for that one piece to put you over the top. Instead, we have more questions than answers.
If you go to the Eagles website it’s all backslaps, and blowjobs over how well they did by accomplishing less than last year, while doing it in embarrassing fashion. Observe:
and then there’s…
Well I’M HERE TO TELL IT! If you want to REAL TALK some Eagles football this “offseason” this is the place to do it. Here’s another good place to do it. There may not be any more games on the schedule, but if you can’t get enough football, bring your ass to where the season NEVER ends, and where your opinion carries weight.
POOR Cowboys fans. 33-10 on our way to locking down the NFC East and it wasn’t even close. It was 33-10 in your HOME. 33-10 in front of a national audience. We humiliated you. Bullied you. Beat you.
BROKE YOU. And it wasn’t even close.
Look at your QB. Look at him.
Giving up on the play to save his life. Feeling the heat. FEARING the hit. His nerve deserting him in front of the world. His back may have been injured, but his spine was missing entirely.
We took that from him.
We took HIM from you. We took Bryant from you. We took Murray from you. We took Witten. My god, we took it all. We just came and TOOK whatever we damned well pleased.
And in 2 weeks, we’re going to do it all over again.
Prior to the last game some of your fans were saying how they hardly saw this as a rivalry. And I have to agree. Cats don’t consider mice rivals. You’ve become prey. The Cowboys are almost a food source now.
And in 2 weeks someone is going to lock you in our cage. Again, in front of a nation audience. Want to guess at how that will turn out? My prediction is-
First, we have this Seattle situation to handle. But you are on the menu. Don’t doubt that. Never doubt that.
See you in a bit.
My home, sweet home
TODAY we go to “war”.
Not the actual kind of war that we Americans have become sadly used to. Just football. Just EAGLES vs Cowboys on Thanksgiving Day.
I’m probably the only fan you’ll hear referring to that game as “just”. The truth is, if it were last week or next week I’d using all the regular incendiary language. Instead it falls on Thanksgiving, our native holiday. Our own Holy day, celebrated nowhere else on this planet.
The purpose of the day is to give thanks. Thanks for our families, our friends, homes, freedoms, way of life… Just anything we have that we weren’t already clutching in our fists when we came to this world. Meaning everything.
Before the game, when I’m too invested in “hating” Americans in different color shirts, I want to give thanks for those differences which have made us as strong as we are today; in spite of the million ways they can be used, and have been used, to divide us.
I want to give thanks to the many things we share of ourselves with each other, despite being so different from each other. That in itself is a marvel. Let me give you an example.
Today, almost 800 miles away, a friend of mine with Cowboys silver and blue in her veins, will wish nothing short of clinical depression for me and everyone else who claims even mild interest in the EAGLES.
The same things will make us happy. First downs and touchdowns. Big gains, and big hits. The same things will make us sad. First downs and touchdowns. Big gains and big hits. We’ll want the same thing for two different teams playing the same game. One of us will be elated after the win. The other will be avoiding my phone calls. (Had to get that in.)
Though we could let something we are passionate about divide us, we both rise above that and focus on the human being and not a sports rivalry. There is strength in that, and it is a strength possessed by many of us.
So knowing that not just EAGLES fans come to this site, before I get carried away with the game, and caught up in the moment, before we go to “war”, I want to take a moment and give thanks for you.
My reader.
My fellow fan.
My fellow American.
EAGLEMANIACAL.com 