Fire The Walrus

Could you imagine if the Eagles were the team being completely screwed over by the replacement refs?! What would have happened if that was the Eagles losing on a last second controversial call – that was CLEARLY and interception – instead of the Packers?

Obviously, Mayfair, Manayunk, Center City, and large parts of South, West and surrounding areas of Philadelphia would be in complete rubble and ash this morning. People would be wandering the streets in torn and tattered, blood-stained clothes, rambling incoherently about Wayne Elliot(*).

(*)You know, as opposed to all the homeless wandering the streets in torn and tattered, blood-stained clothes, rambling incoherently…

It’s a good thing this happened to a lethargic, overweight, easygoing area like Wisconsin. They can suppress their anger with BBQ and cheese curds… We’d be out for blood. And rightfully so.

This replacement ref issue is about as ridiculous and short-sighted as Jeffrey Lurie’s continued infatuation with Andy Reid. The NFL PRINTS billions and billions of dollars, why let something like $20-50 million affect the integrity of the game and season?

We encourage you to read Grantland’s Bill Barnwell gives a spectacular take on what we’re calling “Replacement Refocalypse,” which culminated in last night’s clusterfuck of an ending in Seattle.

Fire The Replacements. Fire The Dictator Commissioner. And, as always, Fire The Walrus.

Well, our worst nightmare — short of a Super Bowl impossibly including both the Giants and the Cowboys — has come to fruition: Another Giants-Patriots Championship Game. And you said this season couldn’t have gotten any worse…

While we were praying for a Harbouwl, we will now be praying for a stadium collapse the apocalypse to occur on February 5(*). Best of luck, world!

(*) Someone get Harold Camping on the phone!

This sucks. The Jersey Giants are on the cusp of winning another Lombardi… Meanwhile, that bloated Walrus washed up on the Ocean City shore is just coming back from vacation, hiding out from the wrath of the fans.

Oh, maybe you didn’t hear… Steve Spagnuolo is the Saints’ new Defensive Coordinator. Yep, Juan is indeed not done. But hey, at least the Eagles 2012 championship hopes already are!

Why haven’t we mentioned this yet? Pure anger. Plus we wanted to see if The Walrus poked his tusks out of his ass to mention it to the media. Of course he didn’t, but rightfully so… There was never an indication from within the organization that they were looking to make a change at Defensive Coordinator, it was simply all speculation(**).

(**)Andy and Spags have the same agent. If you buy that there wasn’t any talk at all, we have some 2011 Eagles playoff tickets to see you.

Why were we angry though? Well, while Head Coaches like the Saints’ Sean Payton and the Falcons’ Mike Smith wasted no time in upgrading their coaching staff, a mere day after getting bounced from the playoffs, The Walrus had his head buried in the sands of the Caribbean. Hope you enjoyed your vacation, Red! Thanks for bringing us back the exact same underachieving staff as last year!

Not only that, he returns to find his arch rivals in the Super Bowl… You’d think that would be a slap in the face to Andy, but he can’t feel a thing through those jowls.

So, here we are Eagles fans. Forced to sit through another Super Bowl without a team wearing Kelly Midnight Green. Another Super Bowl with our rival Jerseyites one win away from another bullet of ammunition against us. Another Super Bowl for the real “Gold Standard” of the NFL.

Another Super Bowl with anger in our hearts and hopelessness on our minds.

Here’s to the Mayan calendar ending early!

First things first… We hate the Giants. REALLY hate them. If it wasn’t for the Cowgirls, all of our football scorn would be directed at the NFC’s New York New Jersey team. Watching them win, on the road, against the best team in football, in such convincing fashion, flat-out sucked.

It sucked as an Eagles’ die-hard. It sucked as an Eli-hater. But what it didn’t suck as… a strong believer that Defense wins in January. In fact, it was a huge reminder — and a prime example — that a dominating Defense is more important than a dominating Offense.

So buckle your seat belts, for we’re about to do the unthinkable: we’re going to praise the Jersey Giants…

Overall, the Giants’ Defense did not rank particularly high during the 2011 season — 25th in points, 27th in yards — but their obvious strength is the front four. Jason Pierre-Paul(*) has transformed from a raw talent to an outright stud of a Defensive End. It’s sad to admit it, but he is carrying on a strong recent tradition of dominate Giants’ DEs — from Michael Strahan to Osi Umenyiora to Justin Tuck — and is now a legitimate star, anchoring a solid line. The Giants barely blitzed Aaron Rodgers. They simply rushed four down-linemen and dropped everyone else into coverage, taking away the Packers’ strength, their passing game.

(*)And yes, it must be pointed out that Andy Reid traded up to the 13th pick to take undersized (to say the least) Brandon Graham, who has 3 career sacks in 16 games, allowing the rival Giants to take JPP at 15th overall. JPP has 21 sacks in 33 games (including playoffs). To be fair though, we were screaming for the Eagles to take Safety Earl Thomas, who went to Seattle at 14th overall and is also a stud (7 INTs, 127 tackles in 32 games). Ugh.

Sure, Green Bay was horribly out of sync on Offense — either attributed to the layoff (resting starters in Week 17 and the bye) or the emotional toll due to the death of Offensive Coordinator Joe Philbin’s son during the week leading up to the game — but this was an Offense that threw the ball even more than Andy Reid-led Offenses. The Packers had a simply putrid run game all season (ranked 27th overall), with Rodgers being their superior runner throughout the Divisional Round game. Not too mention the fact that the Pack’s O-Line got hit bad with the injury bug late in the year. Add all of those factors up and you can see why the Giants were able to get four sacks, while hitting Rodgers on five other plays, and pressuring the most accurate passer in the league to throw his seventh INT of the year.

But it wasn’t just a dominating front four. As Grantland.com’s Bill Barnwell points out in his weekly “The Fabulous and The Flops” column, Giants’ Linebacker Michael Boley played an integral role:

As the only Giants linebacker with much in the way of speed, Boley often spends his time as the coverage guy by default. With a total of three sacks during his three seasons with the Giants, you would have been forgiven if you didn’t expect to see him making big plays in the backfield on Sunday. Instead, Boley delivered the game of his life. He sacked Aaron Rodgers twice, picking up a third-down sack that forced a punt and set up the Hail Mary drive, and then adding to it with a sack on fourth-and-5 early in the fourth quarter. With the Packers inside Giants territory while down by just seven, they might even have been favorites to win the game at that moment. Instead, after Boley’s sack, they didn’t touch the ball again with a chance to tie the game on one play. Boley also broke up a pass and had three tackles for loss.

Huh… so Linebacker ARE important?! Who knew?!

But credit also needs to go to Giants’ Defensive Coordinator Perry Fewell. The interim Head Coach of the Bills in 2009, Fewell will surly be considered for a Head Coaching gig this offseason — EARTH TO THE EAGLES!!! — and his unit’s performance against the #1 Offense in the NFL should be at the top of his resume. Taking a page right out of former-Giants’ DC (and our personal favorite for the next Eagles’ DC) Steve Spagnuolo’s Super Bowl 42 playbook, the Giants’ gameplan in last week’s game was pressure, pressure, pressure. Get to Rodgers, disrupt his rhythm, knock him down. It’s how the Giants beat the Patriots in 2007 and it’s how they beat the Packers here(**).

(**)And in no way are we discrediting the fact that Rodgers’ receivers betrayed him with bad drops all game. We will, however, discredit Eli Manning’s lucky hail mary at the end of the first half. Eli pulled a horseshoe out of Hakeem Nicks’ ass.

So, as always, Defense wins in the playoffs. We got push back on Twitter over the weekend, with some claiming that the Packers won last year’s Super Bowl with a dominate Offense. Let it be known that the 2010 Packers had the 2nd overall ranked Defense in the NFL… and the 10th ranked Offense.

Which brings us to an interesting question… Is Tom Coughlin a better Head Coach than The Walrus?

Before 2007, we would have said no way. Then the guy whose team seemingly quits on him annually, won a Super Bowl. Even then, we couldn’t put Red Face over Big Red. But let’s look at their numbers:

Removing his years with the Jaguars, in eight years with the Giants, Coughlin has a Regular Season record of 74-54, for a winning percentage of .578. In thirteen seasons, Reid is 126-81-1, for a winning percentage of .608. Red Face Coughlin is now 6-3 in the playoffs, with four of those wins coming on the road — two of which had a ridiculously high degree of difficulty at Lambeau Field against superior teams — and one being a Super Bowl win. Big Red Reid is 10-9 in the playoffs, with four of those losses coming in the NFC Championship Game (three of which his team was favored to win).

Coughlin’s teams have failed to make the playoffs more frequently than Reid’s and have been one-and-done three times — with two of those ousters coming at the hands of Reid and our Eagles. The Walrus’ teams seem to always find a way to the second season, but haven’t won there since 2008. Coughlin’s teams have a tendency to underachieve and/or stop listening to their coach. Andy’s teams don’t quit (minus this season’s game in Seattle) but can’t win the big game or play up to their abilities. Both coaches have had Defensive Coordinators carry them (Jim Johnson with Reid, Spags/Fewell with Coughlin). So, it’s really a wash.

But Red Face has what the Walrus doesn’t: the Super Bowl trump card.

We hate to admit it, but Tom Coughlin is a better coach than Andy Reid. Seriously, how does The Walrus still have a job?

We will now go lay down on I-95.

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.