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December 2006
Flocking toward Da Iggles
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Lose Jevon Kearse for the season.
Lose Donovan McNabb for the season.
Lose enough games to be in danger of posting a losing season.
Bring in Jeff Garcia out of absolute desperation.
Beat the Cowboys convincingly on Christmas day, muzzle T.O., win your division and give yourself a chance to earn a home playoff game.
Check.
WTF?
The Eagles are generating plenty of bandwagon attention after thoroughly dominating in Dallas and rising above the pathetic mediocrity of the NFC.
And there was no booing of Santa in Philly this year.
Andy Reid’s bunch is 9-6, and his improvisational skills virtually are being equated to a riff of spontaneous brilliance from Dizzy Gillespie:
“I look at it one game at a time, so I think anything is possible I felt like we could do whatever we needed to do. We just had to get it going in the right direction.”
Are Da Iggles taking on Garcia’s personality?
Another fan is happy, but cautiously so.
While Da Iggles are flying high, your Atlanta Falcons continue to veer headlong toward the ground, likely crashing out of the playoffs for the second straight year with a spectacular second-half swoon. Even if the even more troubled Giants fall apart on Saturday, the Falcons still need the Packers, Rams and Panthers to do the same, and then win at Philly on Sunday.
High unlikely, but …
They’re in a group of pretenders who are actually contenders.
Yes, the free fall continues at Flowery Branch. And yet …
When you exempt the Raiders, Lions and Browns from the list of worst teams in the NFL, who takes the top (or bottom?) in one man’s poll? The “quintessentially putrid” Falcons, who lost to the latter two teams to start their downward spiral.
A Falcons fan has gone on an Eagles fan message board, begging for the Falcons to be “destroyed” so Mora will be fired, among other things.
Predix: Rams will get the last wild card spot. Why? They’re the only team favored to win this weekend. It may sound lame, but no more so than the teams still alive.
More Predix: Iggles 5-1 favorites to go to the Super Bowl. Falcons: 150/1. In other words, not much better odds than their chances of winning Sunday.
Not everybody’s phanatic about Philly:
“In short, the Eagles are peaking at the right time. They are certainly capable of winning a first-round playoff game, especially if that game is in Philly. The Eagles have had trouble with mobile quarterbacks this season (Vince Young, David Garrard), but they have a long history against Michael Vick and have shut him down in key games before. The Falcons are playoff desperate, but their running game has deteriorated in recent weeks, and Vick won’t have a good game against the Eagles secondary. Throw in the cold-weather element and Jim Mora’s tenuous grasp on his coaching job, and you have the makings of a Falcons meltdown.”
Haven’t we seen this movie before?
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These Bucs stop everywhere
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
What a difference a win — and a convincing performance — can make on the No. 7 front.
The buzzing over Vick’s middle digit has all but died down, except for the fine folks at NPR, who on Wednesday a.m. invited the AJC’s Jeff Schultz to talk about the incident, and the Falcons’ QB in general.
Money exchange:
Schultz: “He’s never given me the finger, and quite a few people in this city have.”
NPR Host: “I don’t want to ask you what you’ve been doing down there.”
That poor Weekend Predictions- and Tuesday Countdown-deprived soul.
In addition to the audibilizing against the Redskins, Vick’s getting more daring in what he says:
“Sometimes, you have to overcome coaching. All the great ones do.”
Keep it cheeky, No. 7.
The Kissing Suzy Kolber blog (I’m not making this up) has a name for the Redskins’ sorry display:
S*#$apalooza. Beware some of the language and certain subject matter.
Tampa Bay fans might have some worse pronouncements for the way their 3-9 team is stumbling. The three points scored against the Steelers in a 20-3 loss were on a last-second field goal — to avoid the shutout.
That’s the first time that’s happened in 73 years — 1933, to be exact. The first year of the FDR monarchy.
Nobody’s performing in TB, and the Bucs have scored a league-low 145 points.
Jon Gruden says he’s sticking with struggling rookie QB Bruce Gradkowski, even with Tim Rattay and Luke McCown in reserve.
Steve Young will be in the house, but part of Alumni Weekend. This is how Pravda’s promoting the game:
“Come and see them.”
Not the present Bucs, but the ones consigned to history.
Lots of unhappy fans are growling about Gruden, but not much has surfaced about his coaching future — not for the moment.
There’s some spin emerging about how dearly depared ex-NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle would have loved the “parity” afoot in the league, especially all those 6-6 teams NFC vying for the playoffs, including the Falcons.
Why not call it exactly what it is?
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Thin-Skinned, and Thin ‘Skins
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Just when the Vick-vivisectioning seemed to have subsided following Sunday’s infamous bird-flipping incident, the Falcons’ embattled No. 7 is getting some belated love during perhaps the most difficult stretch of his NFL career.
Not long after one online loudmouth suggested that Vick’s best bet is to be tailback, a contrarian voice from the same outlet strongly took Vick’s side, pointing the figure of blame entirely at the brass:
“The bashing of Vick has become gratuitous, too easy, like fart jokes or mocking Pamela Anderson.”
“He has never played with a great wide receiver.”
“He is currently playing for an offensive coordinator who is about as creative as a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.”
“Perhaps no great player in the recent history of professional football has been so ill-served by a coaching staff and personnel department as Vick has by the Falcons organization.”
Sentiments some of you have battered about here on these blogs and elsewhere, no doubt. And rather tame, to boot.
Yet some of you take all this too seriously, wouldn’t you agree?”
“NFL Grants Vick Permission to Flip Off Atlanta Fans, Press”
Reminder folks — it’s fake news, totally, including the Photoshopped pic.
For those of you wishing for a more high-minded discussion of the subject, an early NFL pioneer — “the Michael Vick of his day” — offers some unsolicited advice the at the behest of a columnist who oozes with empathy for Vick.
Because that link’s behind a paid firewall, here are few highlights worth noting:
“The first thing I will tell him is, ‘Mike, you care, and as long as you care, you are going to be fodder for criticism,’ When you get to the point where you don’t care, you will not be any good to yourself, to the football team. You are the present-day Jackie Robinson, Paul Robeson, Ray Robinson — all of these people were people who really cared about what was going on. And they put themselves in harm’s way, just to make sure that people like me would be inspired to do the very best that we could be. And that’s all you can do.’ ”
Conclusion by the scribe: “Michael Vick’s problem is that he’s ahead of his time.”
Maybe so, but this is just a bit too much hyperbole for Enemy Watch to digest on an empty stomach.
Sunday’s opponent, the Washington Redskins, is trying to recapture a glimmer of faded glory under Joe Gibbs, doing his second tour of duty in Old D.C.
But these are hardly the Redskins of Enemy Watch’s 20-something years, domiciling in Das Kapital and watching neighbors taking to pots, pans and kazoos in a makeshift band after Doug Williams orchestrated a memorable Super Bowl win.
This was the same Super Bowl, when, during Media Day, a credentialed journalist asked Williams how long he’d been a black quarterback. It was a more simple, yet daunting issue at the time, something that could not have anticipated the Vick phenomenon now.
No, these Redskins have long since abandoned the raucous, odorous RFK for the suburbs and the soulless, spit-shine corporate confines of FedEx Field, which some loyalists fear is being infected with artificial crowd noise.
Nothing should be allowed to compete with the passion stirred by the team’s famous marching band clanging out “Hail to the Redskins,” a real treat when Enemy Watch sat nearby in the bouncy field level section at RFK.
Curse you, Dan Snyder.
In their non-illustrious history, the Falcons have one win in 11 tries in Washington. But that’s not why this prognosticator is going with Redskins at -2.
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