Post Mortem Media Roundup

Lose your best hitter in baseball for that period of time and it's bad, really bad. But baseball has no salary cap. You can spend to replace, the way the Chicago Cubs blew the Phillies out of the water yesterday in the Alfonso Soriano sweepstakes. You can call up a minor league hotshot, if you have one. You can trade.

The Yankees lost two All-Star outfielders, Hideki Matsui and Gary Sheffield, early last season and scarcely missed a beat.

But lose the franchise quarterback and it's game, set, match and season.

The long-term prospects for McNabb, who turns 30 on Saturday, are not much better. The tear to his right anterior cruciate ligament will require surgery, and the standard recovery period is anywhere from eight months to one year, which makes McNabb's return to the lineup for the start of the 2007 season a question mark.

This is the fourth significant injury in the last five seasons for McNabb, and at some point his ability to regain his form can't be taken for granted. He broke his ankle and missed the last six regular-season games of the 2002 season, began the 2003 season with a hand injury that led to a 2-3 start (although he did not miss any games), and suffered a sports-hernia injury in 2005 that eventually knocked him out for the final seven games of the season.

Only the 2004 season, when McNabb led the Eagles to the Super Bowl, was relatively injury free for him in that span. And while the injuries are unrelated, this latest, a major tear in the knee of a mobile quarterback - the same knee he pushes off when throwing the football - is an ominous shadow that falls heavily across his playing future.

Thumbs Down

To that useless "elephant" package the Eagles use down near the goal line. They bring in Scott Young as an extra blocker on the line and line up 350-pound rookie center Nick Cole in the backfield as a fullback. Young was flagged for a false start one time and Cole was ineffective as a lead-blocker.

"We have to pick up the slack and roll," Brian Dawkins said after another embarrassing loss to a bad opponent.

"We've just got to continue to play," cornerback Lito Sheppard said. "We all just have to step up our game."

The mystery here is whether the Eagles are trying to fool us, or they're really fooling themselves. They seem to believe they're a good team that isn't playing well. They seem to believe they can make a playoff run without McNabb, the way they did back in 2002.

PERHAPS IT was a ruse to begin with. Perhaps we only imagined a philosophical shift when the Eagles swamped the Redskins here 8 days ago, running the ball on first down, passing in the more traditional long-yardage situations. Perhaps when the head coach said he passed off play-calling to his offensive coordinator, it was with a wink and a nod. Other than that, it's hard to explain why Andy Reid was out there yesterday with sheet in hand, or why the Eagles threw the ball on the first two first downs of their first drive, or why he answered a question about play-calling after the 31-13 loss to Tennessee this way:

"I called them today."

"The only way to look forward is to not look back."

- Jamaal Jackson, Eagles center