Eagles president Joe Banner spoke to the media this week and as best I can tell actually said nothing at all. The local reporters, as is their job as people who have to write about something every day, tried their best to extract some type of meaning out of Banner's comments. I don't really mean that as a criticism, I mean it in a sympathetic way. He was asked about a wide variety of topics from Andy Reid to Michael Vick to even Nnamdi Asomugha. The Reid question though seemed to stir up a bit of controversy.
The Daily News ran a headline on a Rich Hoffman column saying that Banner was "lukewarm" on his head coach. In the column, Hoffman opined that maybe Banner wasn't entirely confident in Reid anymore because he refused to answer the question of whether Andy Reid was "on the clock."
Now, just to illustrate how there really was almost no substance in anything he said and that these writers are just trying to ascribe some kind of meaning to it, the Inquirer's Jonathan Tamari, who listened to the same press conference wrote an article entitled, Banner Expresses Confidence In Reid. The funny thing for me, whose only interaction with either paper is Philly.com, is to see two or three articles written by different people about the same event with differing perceptions of what was said.
In response to Hoffman article, Joe Banner actually went on WIP to deny that he's lukewarm on Reid despite the fact that he never said anything to the contrary. He was asked a question that the reporter knew he wouldn't answer, so he gave a non answer, and the reporter just assumed what he wanted anyway. I think it was a mistake to ascribe any meaning positive or negative to what he said. I listened to it. He talked a lot. He said things... Nothing of note... but when the Eagles president talks, you gotta write about it... but I don't see the point in attaching meaning to something that doesn't have it. I mean, did you all read his remarks on whether the Eagles might pursue a guy like Asomugha? It was just a factual description of how NFL free agency works.
Check out Banner's comments on WIP after the jump.
"We are determined to win a Super Bowl," Banner told Eskin and Reese yesterday. "Actually, we're determined to win more than one. And as long as we believe that Andy Reid is the person out there, in the leadership position of the team, on both the personnel and coaching front, that gives us the best shot at doing that, he'll be the head coach. If we ever reached the point where we didn't believe that, then we would be making a change to get somebody we thought could."But I want to be really clear - I have no reservation whatsoever . . . I can't imagine you could find a player that's played for him or a coach that's coached with him that would tell you 'I don't think this guy's a good enough coach to win a Super Bowl.' You're just not going to find that . . . To me, the fact that he hasn't done it yet isn't proof that he can't or won't. You wish he had, and sometimes it's baffling that he hasn't, but I sit here very confident that he is a person capable of leading this team, making the decisions, and winning a Super Bowl, in fact, multiple Super Bowls. I'm even shocked that it hasn't happened yet."
"I'm unabashedly a big Andy Reid fan," Banner said. "There's nobody more frustrated that he hasn't won a championship than Andy, and who works tirelessly every minute of every day, isn't afraid of making changes, isn't afraid of taking chances, to try to get us over the top. And he has our support . . . My bet is, we're not sitting here 3 years from now having to deal with that hypothetical, because we will have won a championship."