***
I am still working on the Self-Scouting Report on the team for this year. I finished a lengthy article on Jim Johnson and the best games/matchups of his time as our DC. I'll post a link when PE.com gets the story up. That was a lot of fun to write. We had some pretty darn good performances over the years.
I was talking on the phone earlier today with a buddy and the subject of the draft came up. We were talking about how impressive it is that the bulk of this team is home grown. And mostly with recent players. Think about what we've gotten from the last 5 drafts (+ UDFAs).
WR DeSean Jackson
WR Jeremy Maclin
WR Jason Avant
TE Brent Celek
RB LeSean McCoy
LT King Dunlap
LG Todd Herremans
OC Nick Cole
RG Max Jean-Gilles
RT Winston Justice
QB Kevin Kolb
DE Trent Cole
DT Brod Bunkley
DT Mike Patterson
DE Victor Abiamiri
LB Akeem Jordan
LB Stewart Bradley
LB Chris Gocong
FS Macho Harris
SS Quintin Demps
The only true weak spot is CB. We've got Jack Ikegwuonu, but that's really it for homegrown guys. And he was not impressive this summer. Marcus Mailei may be the FB of the future, but that's very much up in the air. We have 19 of 22 spots filled with players taken in the last 5 years.
That's really funny when you consider that time and again we've heard about how the window was closing on the Eagles. I wrote about this in December of 2005. I knew then that Big Red and the front office would have a plan in place to rebuild the team on the fly. And that is just what happened. Here is a trip in the wayback machine for those who want some interesting perspective (or have time to kill):
-- Link --
The hole at CB will be filled in this year's draft. We haven't had to spend picks there because of Lito, Sheldon, Joselio, and Sammie. Lito is history (hurt for the Jets this weekend). Sheldon might be in his last year in Philly. Suddenly we have a need to take a CB or two in the early part of the draft.
_
3 comments:
This supports a point I made (or maybe wanted to make) in another thread; that Andy has done something not many coaches have or can do - rebuild their current team.
Most coaches are hired to rebuild a team after it hit rock bottom, but I can't name many coaches who brought their team to glory, then rebuilt it back to dominance after the cyclical drop-off. Jeff Fisher comes to mind.
Of course, this is due in part to the "win now" attitude of the NFL. But Andy hasn't had a truly mediocre team since the Super Bowl appearance.
The most impressive thing is definitely that we never really did hit rock bottom. We had one 6-10 season but honestly that was more due to a freak amount of injuries and the TO situation than anything else, and then 2 of the last 3 "rebuilding" years we've won playoff games. How absurd is that? Do you realize that if we make the NFC Championship game this year we'll have been in 6 of the last 9 NFC Championship games? It's more common for us to be IN championship games than not in them this decade. The flipside of course is never having brought home the lombardi, but thats an absurd amount of success otherwise.
Q was '03 & all just outside th last 5.
Post a Comment