Eagles are reportedly hot on Chip Kelly, and will interview Broncos Coach Mike McCoy. I’m for Broncos OC Mike McCoy. Any guy that can make offenses work with Orton, Tebow or Peyton Manning can coach.. Also, I would hope McCoy would be cool with having a strong GM, not a co-signer GM that basically launders his player personnel decisions (see the end of Andy Reid’s tenure).

An article jumps to a dubiouys conclusion when reviewing weight gain of college football players between their last year in high school and first year of college:

4. I’m also sure of what an SEC strength and conditioning coach told me is another confounder, and I swear this will be the saddest thing you hear all day: a lot of incoming freshmen, especially those hailing from rural high schools and homes below the poverty line, gain a huge amount of weight because their freshman year of college marks the first time they’ve ever gotten three adequate meals a day. That weight gain isn’t just late-night pizza: it’s a body used to doing work on half the fuel a well-fed body gets.

5. This is not just the anecdotal evidence supplied by one person. A Georgia high school team that made the 2011 state championships had problems with malnutrition. TheUSDA’s own report on food insecurity in the United States is terrifying enough, but go ahead and look at it compared to a map of starting roster talent shown by state. With the exception of Louisiana and Florida, the most food-insecure states also correspond to those producing the majority of college football talent in the United States

via A quick word on steroids in college football – SBNation.com.

This is a potentially huge problem for another reason. Poor childhood nutrition may be linked to higher incidences of late life neurological disorders: Alzheimer’s dementia, depression and Parkinson’s disease. The same family of ailments linked to CTE caused by concussions from repeated high impact trauma.

Garrett Reid was on the Philadelphia Eagles strength and conditioning staff.

When he died of an apparent drug overdose with a bunch of syringes and vials of an unnamed drug in his room, a bunch of people guessed steroids. Well they were right. The amounts Reid had in the room was the amount that when possessed would make you a pusher in the eyes of many state laws.

This sad decline marks the end of the Reid era with the Eagles.

Goodell has a lot more PR background than Tagliabue has and it creeps into his operations roles far too much. That is now evident in this case.

In Tokyo this week. Had to watch my Eagles find ways to lose to the Dallas Cowboys in Hooters in Akasaka-Mitsuke:

Despite all of this, the Eagles lost their eighth straight game on Sunday night, a streak that Philadelphia hasn’t seen since losing the first 11 games of the 1968 season.

The Dallas Cowboys emerged victorious at home in a 38-33 shootout, improving to 6-6, and giving them sizable hope of obtaining a playoff spot.

The Eagles fell to 3-9, leaving them at rock bottom in the NFC, and perhaps a loss or two away from being the worst squad in the entire NFL.

source: Tony Romo Has Career Night as Cowboys Upend Eagles.

Any Eagles fan knows, 1968’s the year on a snowy, sub 20 degree day at Franklin Field a 5’6″ amateur Santa Claus was pulled from the stands, trotted out as a last minute replacement for the annual Christmas Pageant in front a miserable 54,000 strong home crowd halfway through watching the Birds lose their final game to finish 2-12 and which was good enough to let the Bills get the first pick of the 1969 draft (OJ Simpson). Sounds like 12/23

It’s that bad and Andy Reid, after a pretty good run, is set to be our own bad Santa.

Note: Yes. I am in Tokyo and went to Hooters. But I had to watch one game of football this week. Judge me all you want…at your desk.

Sanchez benched for McElroy.

Much to the crowd’s dismay, McElroy stood idly by on the sidelines as Sanchez scuffled through the first three quarters. And the more he struggled, the louder the “Mc-El-Roy” calls grew.

But despite the boos for Sanchez, Ryan stayed with his starter.

Sanchez’s poor play turned what should have been a matter-of-fact win against an overmatched, third-string rookie quarterback into an ugly, brutal-to-watch nail-biter. The Jets’ starting quarterback was picked off three times and sacked twice by the Cardinals. Former Jets safety Kerry Rhodes intercepted Sanchez’s first play of the game (a pass intended for Jeremy Kerley) and Rhodes also picked off Sanchez in the final minute of the first quarter.

source: Mark Sanchez benched, Greg McElroy leads Jets past Cardinals.

I’m excited to see McElroy play in the NFL, precisely because he’s boring. He’s a guy who just didn’t make mistakes at Alabama and had some command of the field in being able to do his job in the frenzy and mania that is the end of a close game. To me, making all the plays routine, even throw aways or checking down to a play and taking a three and out just outside your opponents side of the field can be masterful if put together with a string of other great decisions.

Sanchez has not been up to the task of keeping his team “on schedule” on the field and may need to re-work how he approaches his execution of the quarterback position.

Also, really glad it wasn’t Tebow. For me, he is a very awful quarterback to watch play. I don’t know what the Jets front office thought bringing him here when they had so many other holes, but I would guess they rethink that now.

A hell of a basketball coach who ran some really solid programs with some memorable teams

“It was a unique experience, I’ll tell you that, and I loved every minute of it,” said Saint Louis guard Kyle Cassity, who was mostly a backup on last season’s 26-win team after starting for Majerus earlier in his college career. “A lot of people questioned the way he did things, but I loved it. He’d be hard as hell on you, but he really cared.”

“Coach has done so much,” Brian Conklin said back then. “Being his first recruiting class, he told me that we were going to help him build something special here. He’s a great coach. I couldn’t imagine playing for a better coach, a better person. He doesn’t just teach you about basketball, it’s about life.”

Saint Louis athletic director Chris May said in a statement that what he would remember most about Majerus “was his enduring passion to see his players excel both on and off the court.”

“He truly embraced the term ‘student-athlete,’ and I think that will be his lasting legacy,” May added.

source: Rick Majerus, College Basketball Coach, Dies : NPR.

Real vote fraud courtesy of the the Florida Republican Party according to the Florida Republican Party.

King Dunlap was supposed to be cut. He wasn’t supposed to be on the Philadelphia Eagles.

Then Pro Bowl Left Tackle Jason Peters tore his achilles twice in the off season. The Eagles signed Demetress Bell from the Bills (who was already on their radar to counter balance Peters at LT) to start at LT in Peters’ stead and initially thought they would keep Dunlap for depth since he already had been with the team.

“I’m definitely going in with the mind set of competing and trying to take somebody’s spot, whether it’s Demetress or somebody else up front,” Dunlap said. “Them bringing him in, yeah, it was frustrating, but it didn’t change my mind set at all. I’m still going into training camp to compete, to earn a starting spot, and do what I can to get on the field and help this team.”

Dunlap, a seventh-round pick back in 2008, is one of only 10 current Eagles remaining from the 2008 team, the last Eagles team to win a playoff game.

Standing 6-foot-9 means Dunlap must really focus on his technique or he can get pushed around. When he uses his arms to gain leverage and stays low, he’s a powerful blocker. When he lets his technique go, he’s inconsistent.

Which is why the Eagles signed Bell on April 5 and gave him a five-year deal worth $34.5 million. But if Bell struggles or gets hurt for the third time in four years, the contract becomes a one-year deal worth $3.15 million. And Dunlap, presumably, goes in.

Dunlap ended up beating out the disappointing Bell for the starting Left Tackle spot. That’s right: they signed a big money free agent, and the guy they were going to cut ended up supplanting the free agent. So that tells you why King Dunlap is doing so poorly: he’s not good enough. The Eagles thought he wasn’t good enough, and then when their plan B failed, they tried to convince themselves Dunlap was good enough to start (subsequently ignoring 4 prior years of sub par performance).

Blame the player personnel folks (Howie Roseman and Andy Reid) before you blame a player who is in over his head. The offense is dead without Jason Peters. Andy Reid had no rea

Cold Hard Football Facts asks “where’s the hype?” and I have to agree. Any barbershop talk I’ve been involved in is about Griffin and RGIII but not Russell Wilson, here is their case:

The biggest story in football is that a charismatic but under-sized 5-foot, 11-inch, 205-pound, third-round draft pick who makes chump change by NFL standards (about $750,000 this year) is in the midst of perhaps the greatest streak of rookie performances in NFL history.

That player is Russell Wilson, and he’s the quarterback for the Seattle Seahawks.

If you watch ESPN, you may not be familiar with Wilson and the Seahawks.

But he was deadly efficient (again) in Sunday’s win over the Jets. He completed 12 of 19 passes for 188 yards, 9.9YPA, 2 TD, 0 INT and a 131.0 passer rating.

That’s a winning performance in any era. And since 2010 players with a passer rating of 130.0 or better are 78-2.

Wilson now owns three of the four highest-rated performances by a rookie QB this season and four of the top six – and he did it Sunday against one of the best pass defenses in football.

The Jets headed to Seattle No. 5 in Defensive Passer Rating (76.5).

But Wilson’s effort – superior to Luck’s performance Thursday and against a better defense – was greeted largely by a national chorus of crickets Monday morning.

So far, I have to agree, Wilson was a fantastic college QB with a kind of weird pathway to NFL and is shorter than many would like, but efficiency is the key, especially when you have a solid defense and running game like Seattle does.

If you fire a head coach or defensive coordinator mid-season, then the season is all but over. By the time a gm or owner gets to firing a coach mid-season you’ve admitted you let a better candidate get a job somewhere else, you have wasted hours of practice time under that inadequate coach and you signal to fans and league: they’ve conceded they had it all wrong.

So, I think firing Juan Castillo was a mistake (maybe play calling needed to go to another coach until the off season) and I also think fans who want to fire Andy Reid need to give it a rest. Andy Reid walking out unemployed after the game tonight if we lose badly to the New Orleans Saints (which I believe we will) will not fix anything. Week 16, right after the game is done is when a guy can be let go. Then a coaching search can begin in earnest. Whatever happens now, we should suffer it.

If the Eagles do continue to stink (and I picked them to be 7-9 this season so I think they will), I don’t want Gruden, Cowher, Dungy, Payton, Parcells or anyone else who has coached a group of men to hoist the Lombardi trophy to be a coach for the Eagles. No coach has won a super bowl as a head coach at two different franchises. In addition, time away from the game doesn’t make you a better coach. The Eagles have got to find a coordinator somewhere and promote him. Whoever that may be, he may not be better than Andy Reid, but Reid doesn’t seem to be the perennial contender builder that he was from 2000 through to 2008. It may be too much control, too many sub par player performances, locker room leadership or too little organizational awareness or something else, but something just seems wrong every time they take the field.