Check in on 5

So last weekend I went through the trouble of making picks based on my own pre-guessed betting lines, wrote about half of them up and put research into them all. Due to my abysmal picks record thus far I felt a need to change up my method a little bit (even if it means I'm focusing more on gambling, which I don't care about, and less on football – which I do). Anyway, for this week I looked over the game and pre-set what I thought the vegas line would end up being and then made my picks based on a discrepancy between those two.

However, none of this mattered, seeing as Friday morning I visited the black hole that is Kenyon College to celebrate Nick’s birthday. Me and the team began the weekend with drinks when I arrived at 5:30 a.m. Shockingly, I never got around to posting the picks.

If you’re curious about how they turned out the basic guess was this: For eight of the thirteen games my line was +/- 1 point of the actual spread, and my record in the games where my personal line was decent but not fantastic enough to establish a theory.

What has changed since then is that, several obvious big stories aside (ex. The Pats run, Adrian Peterson, the Pack being improbably good, the Chargers possible turnaround, etc), my interest in the league as a whole began to waver.

Nova started their season by waxing some nobody (although with the OSU and Kentucky losses nobodies are looking more and more formidable) and looked sick doing it. The Sixers, although a joke, are my joke, and expectations aside I’m excited to watch the dynamic frontline of Calvin Booth and Reggie Evans take the court.

But before I move on the land of milk and guardplay, I’m going to backtrack to everyone’s favorite stomping ground, namely our QB1, Donovan McNabb.

I have the belief that scandal is widespread across sports, regardless of the game being played. I also believe that generally, these scandals don’t affect the team in question at all, because if the team is winning or on the rise, who cares about a peripheral scandal? Fans are already getting the all information they need to keep their attention, and players can generally handle their own.

If the Eagles are winning the story doesn’t have to be “what’s wrong” because Eagles fans across the area are tuning in to hear about what’s right. It doesn’t matter if a player is upset with his playing time if that player is performing on the field. Those old St. Johns’ teams would get into fistfights in the locker-room before games (true story) but we only heard about them years later because that team was good – no need to focus on the bad to make fans look when fans are already tuned in.

The 90s cowboys teams had the ‘white house’ – where they did piles of drugs on top of piles of strippers – and Troy Aikman was apparently a big gay (Skip Bayless’ words, not mine) but these stories only emerged after their run was over. Why? Because on the meta-level sports writers don’t care why people read them, and sportstalk doesn’t care why people tune in. When teams are winning, that’s all the news that matters. Scandals don’t seem to matter to players either, unless they’re widely talked about it. On the field, professional players tend not to be easily distracted.

However, it is a lot harder to block out something that you hear about ten times a day, everyday. Charles Barkley once said that if an athlete says he doesn’t read the papers, he’s lying; they all know what is going on in and around their team. When fans stop caring about the games and start caring about the players, which happens on losing teams, those questions they have to answer stop being about the games and start being about the players … thus the tangible distraction.

Why this all relates to McNabb is that through this lens we may be able to see how defensive 5 really is.

There is a real possibility that the Philadelphia Eagles QB1 may have never felt truly comfortable in Eagles’ green. That the man dominated in yellow and blue may be an apt symbol for the beginning of the end of his time here. Truth be told, why should he feel comfortable? We booed him before he threw a snap and booed him again after he brought us to the Super Bowl – but it seems that he’s beginning to acknowledge that discomfort in more and more obvious ways.

His mother frequently suggests her own unhappiness with Philadelphia sports fans – bringing up the booing at the draft often and referring to last season’s run with Garcia at the helm as “bittersweet.” At the time we all seemed to brush off these statements as the words of a loving mother who wanted nothing but the best for her child, but the fact that her words weren’t vehemently shot down by 5 himself may be more telling than we gave credit for.

Also, after last season Andy Reid prohibited McNabb from talking to the press. This story still has never been explained, but there are at least two logical explanations.

1. Reid knew that McNabb didn’t want to hear what the press had to say and intervened on QB1’s behalf. This first scenario is not implausible at all; Reid has a long history of covering for his players and if McNabb asked Reid to keep the media away (or Reid just sensed that was McNabb’s wish at the time), it wouldn’t have offended anyone for Reid to have acted upon that impluse. Intuitively this made the most sense to me at the time, but the fact that McNabb hired his own publicist and started his own image-reclamation project without the knowledge or permission of the team during this past offseason may suggest otherwise. This first scenario suggests that McNabb has thin skin and either needed or wanted to be protected from outside criticism; and possibility 2 may be more problematic .

2. Reid knew that he didn’t want the press to hear what McNabb had to say, and intervened on the Philadelphia Eagles’ behalf. McNabb’s mother saying that she was bothered because she knew that Philadelphia fans are fickle is one thing, 5 himself saying such things may be something completely different. McNabb started last season as hot any QB in the history of the game – save this year’s edition of Tom Brady. It would not be absurd for him to feel slighted by the lovefest thrown upon a game-manager when his own grand achievements were so rarely celebrated. McNabb’s longstanding unhappiness also may have contributed to the black QB scandal earlier this year.

The Birds then picked Kevin Kolb with the explanation that we had no immediate holes to fill, a premise that eight games later my mother could find flaws in. Still (to my knowledge) the team hasn’t acknowledged that McNabb came up from surgery early and may still be fighting effects – it takes TWO full years to recover from major knee surgery. Fact.

McNabb’s MNF football comments about how he thinks he only gets cheered in Philly when he runs outside the pocket (read: acts black) further revealed his discomfort, but it may have been his most recent press conference that really opened the floodgates.

Following the ugly Cowboys loss McNabb talked openly about how, “it's easy to blame the quarterback when the team loses, but I'm definitely not the whole reason why we lost these games.” These statements were made on the team’s official website – no misquote claims possible. 5 continued, “I [shouldn't get the full] blame for everything that goes on around here.”

There are a couple things at play here: No, QB1 shouldn’t be blamed for missing tackles, dropping passes (and punts), poor gameplanning, and a lack of weapons, but that is pretty common fact – something that every sports writer in the city has explicitly said, and that sports fans understand implicitly anyway. It is also something best left unsaid by the McNabb himself.

McNabb shouldn’t be talking about blame at all; he shouldn’t even be talking about lost games either. It may be cliché to say, but this is a long season and while I – the casual sports fan – may be allowed to give up and reclaim hope dozens of time a season he – the quarterback of my team – damn well better not think for a second that he’s going to bring home anything less than 12-5 plus a bowl and the whole damn dinner table.

Scandal may exist within Sport, but it strikes losers … we’re 3-5.