[Rainy Parade]

Originally Posted by Schneed10

Tremendous insight from this guy, appropriately places part of the Eagles' failures on McNabb, and partly on Andy Reid.

agree, that was the best one.

i had to trim some of it, as it was too long. here's all of the original post by "Hooky"

OK, I'll play along.

First of all, the reason there's no preview or edit feature is intentional. This site's pretty much a snapshot of the place that inspired it. As such, when you open your mouth (or type as the case may be), you're judged by what comes out, and there's no take-backs or do-overs (no matter what your condition may be at that particular time).

Anyway, about the question at hand. I think if you take out the extreme fringes of both sides of the 5 debate you'll get something that looks like this: Very good QB who (at one time, perhaps again) can make the kind of plays that very few guys in this league can make. Because of this trait, he was able to keep this franchise in contention for the better part of a decade. As far as his mechanics & skills go, that's pretty much the same thing that you'll read elsewhere. He can heave a ball 70 yards downfield, but it's in the short game where his flaws are more prevalent. He throws low and hard. In a precision scheme (like the one that Andy has tried to implement here...you'll note that I said "tried"), this becomes very much a magnified flaw. When he has confidence in his line and his feet are set, he's better able to make these throws, but this brings up the second flaw...he holds on to the ball WAAAY too long. I think that's one of the things about his career INT stats which is somewhat jilted. He's always been a guy who's hated tossing picks, but that's not as good of a thing as you might think. He hates taking chances. He'll take the sack or make an incredibly bad checkdown throw instead. My take has been that for the better part of his time here, he was looking for separation from his receivers which these guys simply weren't capable of producing. The only two times when this wasn't the case were last year with Jackson and in '04 with Owens. In the case of the latter, he really trusted the fact that if he just put the ball up there in the neighborhood, T.O. would come down with it more often than not. In the case of the much smaller D.Jackson, he was charged with putting the ball in front of him, which he was able to do simply with arm strength. Without those kind of weapons, he'll probably look to find a soft-handed checkdown (like he had in Chad Lewis), but whoever that person is better start doing deep knee bends right now, because that ball is going to be coming in low and fast.

That covers the player, now for the man. First of all, he's a good guy. He's the kind of person who won't end up making negative headlines for any actions off the field, but in spite of this, he wasn't fully embraced by the fanbase here. Most fans would agree that what happened on draft day in '99 was an abberation and unrepresentative of the vast majority of fans. Despite the cheers and accolades over the years, he never seemed to be able to let that go. He had many opportunities over the years to step up and make a statement about himself either publicly or on the field, but elected not to. Instead, he had the tendency to portray Donavan the comic, which many times backfired (see: the entrance into Cowboys playoff game this season). This led many fans to think that he didn't take the game as seriously as they did. This is a cardinal sin in Philadelphia.

Final analysis time. McNabb was/is a very good QB who was brought into a situation in which his personality and abilities were right enough to make this team very competitive, but flawed enough to undermine the team's ultimate efforts. Some of it is the organization's inability to build a system around the talents of the player, rather expecting the player to perform under a specific system. This part was Reid's fault. The part which was on McNabb is that he was never able to get past the part of himself which continually faulted the environment around him, rather than putting his efforts into working on the aspects of his game which needed to be addressed in order to succeed in this system.