FanPost

Some Preseason Thoughts

Hello again, Eagles Nation.

For those of you who follow my posts (hi, mom) my last, uh...article, pretty much explained in vast detail what I thought the Eagles should do during the offseason. Those thoughts were as follows. 1: Re-sign key players and 2: Draft players in positions that need young blood and/or depth. To my fault, I failed to suggest specific players in the draft for any of the positions I mentioned (which was ALL of them). However, the main point I was trying to make was that all the organization needed to do was keep the team together, and do so for a set amount of time.

And, wouldn't you know it, they signed practically their whole offensive line, LeSean McCoy, and the most important signing in my opinion, DeSean Jackson. In the draft, they not only drafted the best players available to them, but those players just so happened to be for positions that needed more help (Fletcher Cox, Mychal Kendricks).

If you're as avid a fan as I am, which is pretty dumb to say on a website like this, you don't need the recap. You know what happened. But you know what? It just feels so damn good to say we have a team with this much solidity to it that I can't help but re-live it. This kind of camaraderie hasn't been felt in quite some time. I've been visiting the Philadelphia Eagles website lately, and I've seen and read a multitude of videos and articles where the players have stated how adamant they are about their "team effort" that it's almost reached levels of extreme annoyance. Almost.

Ever since the Flyers and Sixers were eliminated from their respective playoffs, I've been desperately searching for something interesting the Eagles have done/said to, y'know, distract myself from the wreckage that is the Philadelphia Phillies season. And then Michael Vick said he believed the Eagles had "a chance to become a dynasty." Now, Vick has been speaking very highly of this entire team since the offseason began, and that's a good thing. The thing that got my blood pressure going is the same thing that made it skyrocket last year: The media.

Look, I get that no matter what the news station, no matter what stupid email website needs a headline for the sports section, and no matter what sports channel, the media needs something to talk about in order to thrive. I get it. I absolutely despise it with a passion, but I get it. But what got to me this year wasn't the fact that they took words out of a player's mouth, it was the that they put their own words INTO a player's mouth. Vick was simply showing optimism and confidence in his team. He wasn't boasting about how his team was going to win the Super Bowl this year and every year he's with the team. He just felt that his team had a chance to become something great. Let's be honest, if he was the only football player in the entire league to have confidence like that, the Eagles probably would have already won the Super Bowl these last two years. You didn't hear this kind of bad media when some of the Phillies players said they could do "great things" after their '08 World Series win, did ya?

Oh, before I continue, let me just say that I'm personally angry at a recent video of Mr. Pablo S. Torre talking about Vick. He goes on to mention Vick's Team V7 clothing line. I just wanted to say that just because Vick got his own brand of clothes, doesn't mean he's still the self-absorbed and heartless human being he was a few years ago. It means he has worked hard enough to the point where he feels he could start this brand of clothing, and in my opinion, use it as a way to inspire and give back to his community. That's what those brands are. They have labels of certain famous athletes (I.E. Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods) on them, but they're meant for OTHER PEOPLE. I mean, for God's sake, the shirts have the same kind of cliched sayings you see on most sports equipment. It's not like Vick plastered his own face on every single damned shirt that got shipped to people who bought it. What I'm saying is no one can really know his true motives for doing this, but it seems to me that the shirts were meant as an inspiration for younger kids, and people in general, to stay in shape. So to everyone in the media I say this: Don't act like you know Michael Vick, because you don't know him in the slightest. The only one who does know Michael Vick is Michael Vick and the God that he believes in.

Alright, I'm good. That's out of my system. I don't know about you, but all of this recent talk has gotten somewhat bland to me. I mean, it's not news to me that players and coaches are going to say positive things and talk about leadership and tough days of training. And occasionally there will be a funny statement about Jason Kelce's beard or something humorous like that. Forgive the shameless plug, but this whole preseason feels a lot like the build-up to The Dark Knight Rises. It had seemed like a lifetime since the last movie, and when I finally saw it, my jaw stayed slammed to the floor the whole way through. It was well worth the wait. But before it was released, I was a little numb to all the commercials and posters because to me, all that mattered was getting to sit in the theater and watch the movie unfold for itself. This season feels no different. I'm obviously excited because this roster is virtually the same (minus one Asante Samuel), but at the same time, this season is the one that we can't allow ourselves to get too hyperactive over and start talking out of our own rear ends like last year. This is the season where we have to ignore the posters and the commercials. We have to wait for the climactic ending of an era that has given us so much in the past 10 years. So when the time arrives for the team to, well, rise after all of this hype, we'll all be sitting in our respective movie theaters, hoping the story's ending doesn't disappoint us.