If you’re not ready Grantland.com, ESPN and Bill Simmons’(*) premiere sports and pop culture journalism site, you’re doing yourself a disservice. It is home to really phenomenal writing and reporting, analysis and humor.
(*)No matter how you may feel about Simmons… or ESPN.
More important, as it pertains to Fire The Walrus, is Grantland’s NFL writer Bill Barnwell – one of the absolute best football writers/analysts on the interwebs. We cannot recommend his writing more, as his (almost) daily pieces have become required reading for us. He is truly doing unbelievable things with football writing and, when it comes to in-depth statistical analysis, there might not be a better scribe out there. Read him and read him often (particularly his Monday breakdown of the previous week’s action and his Tuesday feature, The Fabulous and The Flops).
Our recommendation of Barnwell goes doubly today, as he post-mortems the 2011 Philadelphia Eagles season with spectacular detail in his article, “A Requiem for The Dream Team From Philly.” He pinpoints the Eagles failures with tremendous accuracy and delves into the reasons why certain aspects of the team failed – the O-Line, the D-Line, the LBs, the Safeties, etc. – with such precision that you would think he spends each day with the team.
Well he doesn’t. And his perspective as an outside, non-objective observer is fantastic. Not to take away anything from local greats like Les Bowen, Reuben Frank, Bob Brookover, Sheil Kapadia, etc., but maybe spending so much time with a team can blind people to certain things.
Though we don’t agree with everything Barnwell says – you’ll note that we wholeheartedly disagree with his fifth point – his take on our team is a must read for all Eagles fans. Will it make you any less mad? Definitely not. But it lends even more credence to why The Walrus must be set to sea.
Barnwell is a great young football mind… and even though we’re remise to ever compare anyone to Ray Didinger – much like the Shady-Barry comparison – he seems poised to eventually become a football encyclopedia in the mold of R. Diddy.
Start reading Barnwell now… thank us later.
Fire The Walrus 