Conlin Weighs In On The Eagles Turnaround

[Rome]

Bill Conlin | The end is not so near, after all

YOU DON'T HAVE to be Nostradamus to write off one of the city's four professional sports teams. Most years, you'd still have an excellent chance to be in the money.

Let's say for argument that on each Phillies Opening Day since 1987 - that's 20 Opening Days - you showed up at your favorite adult-beverage boutique and loudly announced:

"OK, listen up. Remember you heard it here first. There ain't no way the Phillies are gonna make the World Series this year."

You would have been right on the money 19 times - 95 percent. Even if you took it back to the gas lights and horse-drawn trolleys of 1883, you would have done handsomely well. Assuming a $20 bet on each Opening Day, a stake of $2,480 unadjusted for inflation, you would have had to hand over your Andy Jackson only five times. That means your Phillies missed making the Big Dance 96 percent of the time. The Yankees, by comparison, have missed making the World Series only 62.5 percent of the time. They have won a pennant an average of once every 3 years.

You would have gone an excellent 38-2 if you had said this before the NFL's first Super Bowl season in 1966: "I'll bet you XX bucks the Eagles won't make it to the Super Bowl."

When Donovan McNabb went down in the Tennessee game during a patch of the worst football played by an Andy Reid team, the Eagles' season was over in my mind. Jeff Garcia was first off the bench to handle the impossible task of replacing a quarterback who might have been headed for an MVP award. When the 36-year-old backup reported to the trainer's room afterward, it wasn't for treatment of an injury; it was for cobweb removal.

I began my column for that Monday's Daily News on this cheery note:

"Bury the Eagles season at Wounded Knee."

I pronounced "game, set, match and season" and elaborated with this dark forecast of the horrors to come:

"Make no mistake, Andy Reid's supercomplicated version of the West Coast offense is wedded totally to the skills of Donovan McNabb. Taking him out of the game plan is like removing the eight-speed automatic transmission from a $62,000 Lexus sedan. The Eagles might be able to clunk along with Garcia or Feeley filling in, but they'll look more like a Yugo than a Maserati."

In the wake of Black Sunday, the Great Unwashed clamored for No. 3 QB A.J. Feeley. The confirmed pocket passer had gone 4-1 in 2002 after McNabb suffered a broken ankle. But his illusory success was accomplished in several games in which the defense was magnificent.

Reid did a noncommittal number for a few days preparing for the Colts, but everybody in the NFL knew he would go with the veteran who had been to three Pro Bowls, a quintessential underachiever who had never been on a team since grade school where he was considered good enough to start.

The great thing Reid did during the most remarkable turnaround in franchise history was that after circling the wagons, he didn't erect the traditional wall with "Us" spray-painted on the inside and "Them" on the outside.

Nope, this time it was all about the "Us."

His players had heard Reid say, "It's on me," after many losses. They knew when Andy said, "I've got to find ways to put us in a better position to win," a stubby finger was pointing at them, as it usually should have been.

They knew their stoic leader had their backs more than anybody they had ever been around, including their parents, siblings and every coach during their pampered careers as elite athletes.

This time, however, in the days following that awful loss to Tennessee and the flat Sunday night defeat in Indianapolis - Garcia played well, by the way - "Us" became all-inclusive.

Reid broke down the whole program, lock, stock and game plans. Rather than saying,

"You've got to step up your games," Andy threw the mace at the feet of his coaching staff, as well. He damn near cut off his own big toe, the mace hit so close to home. He reordered his own football philosophies, pretty much inflexible until this season-on-the-brink crucible dropped on his broad shoulders. Hello, run game, our old friend; it's nice to have you back again.

The result has been one of the great feel-good, group step-up turnarounds in my often-fruitless 46-year search for teams to embrace who have found answers that transcend mere X's-and-O's.

It took a locker room filled with deeply committed athletes to rally around Garcia, to turn up the physical intensity at least a notch, to park individual egos at the door and go with a coaching staff of men who acknowledged they needed to be more aggressive. Yet at the same time, they had to be smarter, to play more into opponent weaknesses - the way the D-line forced Cowboys QB Tony Romo to stay inside the tackles with intelligent, controlled outside pressure that kept him from scrambling outside and throwing to receivers who had broken off their routes.

I'm a no-cheering-in-the-press-box guy. Always have been, even before longtime colleague Jerome Holtzman wrote a book of baseball-writer interviews with that title. I am normally reserved even in my own den, preferring to analyze events as they unfold rather than to apply body or vocal English to the outcome. Christmas was different, however.

Warmed by a minimum of holiday cheer (hardly by choice), I could have been at home in the Vet's 700 level. While Garcia orchestrated the dismembering of a Cowboys team unanimously predicted to win by that quartet of self-important foofs on the NBC "Football Night in America" set, I even high-fived my startled calico cat. (And got a bleeding wound to show for it.)     Ha!  GOOD KITTY!

If Gene Wilder's Dr. Frankenstein had seen me lurching in front of the majestic, 65-inch RCA Scenium, cackling at each Terrell Owens drop and bellowing at each Birds first down, he might have shrieked:

"It's alive! It's alive! It's alive!"

And so are the Eagles.

[MURP]

no pun intended eh.

[Rome]

no pun intended eh.

Maybe just a wee bit.