Today, the City of Brotherly Love introduced a brother who recently has been loved dearly in the joint.

This is. The Steelers gutted the Chargers yesterday in the final playoff game of the weekend. The conference championship rounds are set, Philadelphia/Arizona and Baltimore/Pittsburgh. If defense wins championships, I think the deck is stacked for whomever wins the AFC to win the Super Bowl. Not to sleep on Philadelphia’s defense, but it is no comparison to Baltimore or Pittsburgh’s tenacious D. I think I would want to see Arizona’s high flying offense square off against the AFC brutes. That might make for an interesting Super Bowl Sunday…or a completely one-sided affair like most Super Bowls have been.

You could call this a professional version of Pros vs. Joes where the pros and joes join forces and takes on the Philadelphia Eagles. It’s unlikely Andy Reid and Donovan McNabb are going to catch a break the rest of the season especially if they keep finding new and pathetic ways to lose. It’s becoming more likely by the week that this could be McNabb’s last season in an Eagles uniform. One also has to question that job status of Reid whose playcalling in recent games could only be rivaled by Rich Kotite and Jerry Glanville.

Former Eagle great Vai Sikahema let Reid have it like Jose Canseco over the benching of McNabb. He equated the benching to a break up by text message. Don’t ask Boris Becker about that. He’s still sore.

“…Getting benched at halftime isn’t the same as dissolving a marriage, but in football terms, it’s often the first step to a final separation.”

No doubt about that. Even if McNabb finishes the season, it’s hard to see him coming back into the same situation or a new system with a new coach. He needs a fresh start. In the meantime, the least Reid could do is respect the guy who has given his body for the cause as Sikahema says.

Not everyone feels for McNabb like the Goalpost Killer. Joe the NFL Bust couldn’t wait to throw his former QB under the bus. Freddie Mitchell better known to you and me as FredEx blames McNabb for the Disaster At The Linc. He refused to answer questions about McNabb directly but made it clear that he thinks Reid is an “amazing coach” and McNabb is to blame for all the Eagles’ problems and his own failures in football.

Did he see this coming, specifically with McNabb?

“Well I mean, when you’re in that environment and you see the intricacies of what’s going on and the plays and stuff like that and what’s not being produced, it was hard for me not to say something. … My situation was pretty bad because I had to pick… go for what was wrong or go for what was right…T.O., a lot of people don’t like him but he was totally in the right.”

Did Reid coddle McNabb too much?

“There was a lot of breast milk out there.”

Mitchell continued and said that if a choice has to be made between McNabb and Reid, Reid should be retained. Of course there’s no mention of Reid’s brilliant 4th and short calls. He also claims that McNabb was to blame for their lack of a relationship and his lack of improvement as a receiver.

Sheil Kapadia has more bitching and conspiracy theories from FredEx’s radio interview such as he and Barry Bonds are blackballed martyrs. Everyone else thinks he should be playing even though he never did anything when he did. He calls T.O., Corell Buckhalter and Brian Westbrook every week. It probably hasn’t crossed his mind that they tell him that he should be playing so he’ll get off the phone faster if they accidentally answer. Maybe he should form a support group with all the mediocre receivers from the McNabb era. They can sit around, drink coffee and complain how it’s his fault they aren’t in the NFL or Hall of Fame.

Has it come to this? Donovan McNabb is proving Bernard “The Executioner”Hopkins right. It was only last week that Bernard Hopkins called out McNabb for being weak and “crumbling under pressure”.

“Some people are athletes, still good, but don’t have that extra ‘I’m willing to sacrifice my life. I’m willing to sacrifice what I have to sacrifice to win.’ … People never forgot when things happen, they see a guy crumble under pressure. Whether they throw up on the highway, whether they throw up on the court, whether they throw up on the football field, when people see that, that sticks in the back of their mind.”

Hopkins continued: “Every athlete should have that killer instinct in him, especially if you the quarterback… If he’s not right here and here [pointing to heart and head], and don’t want it, the team feel the vibes…”

McNabb didn’t do himself any favors yesterday leading the Eagles to a tie against the Bengals with four interceptions. The topper came in the postgame press conference when he admitted that he didn’t know ties were possible in the NFL.

Talk about not being right in the head. How could McNabb not know that games can end in ties? How long has he been in the league? How could he not know the rules? Let’s put his lack of knowledge about the basic rules aside for a moment. It’s not like anyone else on the Eagles knew what time it was.

“To be honest, I didn’t know there wasn’t going to be another overtime,” [safety Quintin] Mikell said. “I didn’t know it was going to be a tie. I was kind of happy. I thought we were going to get another overtime. After I realized it was a tie, I was pretty ticked off. I felt we should have come in and won this game. That’s a team we should have beat. We didn’t come out ready to play, all across the board, so it’s a loss to me.”

What does Herm say? “You play to win the game!” Does this mean Andy Reid didn’t know the game could end in a tie as well? Were the Eagles playing for another overtime period instead of the win since they didn’t realize the game was going to end? If so, add today’s debacle to the list of donkey moves along with the goalline disaster at the end of the Bears game several weeks ago.

Once again, Reid’s decision making and McNabb’s execution have to be called into question. They can still make the playoffs but they won’t go anywhere if they do. It may be time to break up the band after the season. The Eagles have only shown excellence in consistent mediocrity during the Reid/McNabb run. I shouldn’t sell them short. They are excellent dick teases. They show a little skin at the beginning of the season and get Philly fans excited. However the fans get in the pants and find out they’re in shemale country again just like last year. How long can this continue before the city cries “uncle”? In the words of Emmitt, the Eagles fans were debacled by their own team once again. Unfortunately it won’t be the last time.

Thanks to PFT for the video.

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Don’t be mad Eagles fans, your team played a good game, you just fell for the oldest trick in the book, the rope-a-dope. Kidding of course, no way the Redskins wanted to be down 14 points with 7 minutes left in the 1st quater but 23 consecutive points will certainly make a team look a lot better after that kind of start. Lets face it though, if the Eagles could just manage one yard in the 4th quarter like the Redskins did (on 4th down i might add) it would’ve been an entirely different game…but they didn’t, so suck it up. Game over, 23-17, Redskins. 4-1 vs. 2-2. Who runs the West Coast offense now, huh punks?

You can whine all you want about your team blowing a 14 point lead, but those 14 points happened in the first 8 minutes of the game. Too bad the game is 60 minutes long. I’ve heard complaints that the Eagles didn’t run the ball enough and should have “run out the clock” after being spotted 14 points in the 1st half of the 1st quarter. The truth is the Eagles tried to run the ball, they just couldn’t do it successfully. The Eagles often ran on 1st down (until the 4th quarter) and were unsuccessful most times they did so. By creating 2nd and 3rd downs with long yardage needed the Eagles were forced to throw the ball to create offense. Sadly for the Eagles, neither their offensive scheme nor personnel are set up to consistently get large chunks of yardage through the air, especially against a team with so many experienced defensive backs like the Redskins.

Westbrook was averaging 2.8 yards a carry on the ground, off his career average of 4.7 a carry, and obviously was hurting from this chest and ankle. To rely on him, in hindsight, was folly. The Redskins D kept the ‘skins in the game after getting shocked on the 1st drive of the game by stopping the run, creating difficult 2nd and 3rd downs to convert, thus rendering the Eagles dink and dunk passing game ineffective.

As useless as the Eagles offense was on the ground, the real culprit here was that the Eagles D just didn’t do what they had to do to win which was disrupt the QB and stop the run. They only registered 1 sack and they recorded 0 interceptions or fumbles. This is a D that thrives off of pressure and the turnovers that result from it and they didn’t do a good enough job of getting to the QB to make their pressure result in turnovers. When you apply pressure and it doesn’t work, usually you give up some points.

That and their double covering of Santana Moss left Chris Cooley wide freakin open the entire game. Did no one on that coaching staff think to cover the Pro Bowl tight end? That wasn’t Zorn’s play calling so much as the Eagles forgetting the Redskins had a TE who could catch a ball. As for stopping the run, were they so concentrated on Zorn’s efficient passing scheme that they also forgot the Redskins had Clinton Portis back there? He ran wild, 145 yards on 29 carries, 5 yards a carry, including runs of 21 and 27 yards. Those breakdowns on the Eagles defense resulted in the Redskins being able to move the ball down the field quite consistently throughout the game.

Basically, when a team runs the ball efficiently, stops the run effectively, controls the time of possession and doesn’t turn the ball over, that team stands a good chance of winning. The Redskins did all that with excellent plays and play calling on offense and defense. It wasn’t just Jim Zorn, it was Jim Zorn and Greg Blache who put the players in position to suceed on both sides of the ball, so any rantings about Zorn have to include Blache as well, the man is coaching a great defense right now. You must give a lot of credit to Andy Reid, Jim Johnson and offensive play caller Marty Mornhinweg however, for playing right into the Redskins schemes on both side of the ball…at least after the 1st half of the 1st quarter. Suckers.

Can I say it again? 4-1! Who woulda thunk it? Not me…seriously.