You could live a thousand years and watch a thousand more NFL seasons and still not begin to figure out what was going on inside the head of Eagles coach Andy Reid over the past three days.
Quarterback switches happen all the time in football, but I’d be hard pressed to remember any previous instance of a coach adamantly supporting one QB after a game and then doing a complete turnaround two days later with no game played in between.
It’s completely and utterly bizarre.
What has Andy Reid been doing for the past three days? Perhaps he was asleep during the entire Detroit game. It’s not out of the realm of possibility, you know. Maybe he slept through that game, woke up, didn’t have any handle on his surroundings, declared Kolb the starter, went back to sleep for two days, watched the game film of Michael Vick against Detroit, and THEN figured out who should start for Philadelphia. That’s about as reasonable an explanation that I can come up with.
Again, this isn’t about the ultimate decision Reid made to bench Kolb for Vick (which was the correct one). The glaring failure of this whole escapade is that Andy Reid took great pains on Sunday to diffuse any controversy by saying Kolb was the starter forever and ever, then magically changed his mind after two days of the team not playing another team. Not only did he change his mind, but then he spent all of yesterday letting everyone know that Michael Vick is the greatest quarterback in the history of everything, ever, and that he now has the ability to actually heal pit bulls merely by whispering poems to them.
The past two days have been like an Eagles two-minute drill played out in slow motion, with every fan yelling at Reid to do something obvious, while Reid sits there and does nothing before finally realizing something needs to be done.
Why is this man always the last person in the universe to recognize what the Eagles have to do? Shouldn’t he be the first? I’ve seen Eagles fans. No offense, it should be easy to be smarter than them. They shouldn’t know better than Andy Reid, but here we are.
This whole episode blows apart a lot of Reid’s credibility. Your first instinct as a fan after this is to assume Reid doesn’t know what he’s doing, and I can’t imagine his players feel all that different. Reid has always been a master of staying the course and doing the most boring thing regardless of circumstances. And now, the one time he’s shown a bit of flexibility, he’s done it at a completely awkward time. He looks like someone who wasn’t even at Ford Field on Sunday. Or worse, someone who has finally decided to bow to public pressure after years and years of refusing. It’s an inexplicable choice. And whether or not Vick plays well down the stretch for the team, this week has been proof that Andy Reid will still find a way to mess it all up.
