Tremendous insight from this guy, appropriately places part of the Eagles' failures on McNabb, and partly on Andy Reid. I can tell you being a Philly resident, talk radio around here (and fans in general) are far too quick to blame McNabb for everything and far too quick to defend Reid.
McNabb is not the best QB in the league, but he is much, much better than what we've had. The question is, can Shanahan bring out what Reid could not.
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Originally Posted by Hooky
I think if you take out the extreme fringes of both sides of the 5 debate you'll get something that looks like this: very good QB who (at one time, perhaps again) can make the kind of plays that very few guys in this league can make. Because of this trait, he was able to keep this franchise in contention for the better part of a decade. As far as his mechanics and skills go, that's pretty much the same thing that you'll read elsewhere. He can heave a ball 70 yards downfield, but it's in the short game where his flaws are more prevalent. He throws low and hard. In a precision scheme, this becomes very much a magnified flaw. When he has confidence in his line and his feet are set, he's better able to make these throws, but this brings up the second flaw...he holds on to the ball WAAAY too long. I think that's one of the things about his career INT stats which is somewhat jilted. He's always been a guy whose hated tossing picks, but that's not as good of a thing as you might think. He hates taking chances. He'll take the sack or make an incredibly bad check down throw instead.
Final analysis time: McNabb was/is a very good QB who was brought into a situation in which his personality and abilities were right enough to make this team very competitive, but flawed enough to undermine the team's ultimate efforts. Some of it is the organization's inability to build a system around the talents of the player, rather expecting the player to perform under a specific system. This part was Andy Reid's fault. The part which was on McNabb is that he was never able to get past the part of himself which continually faulted the environment around him, rather than putting his efforts into working on the aspects of his game which needed to be addressed in order to succeed in this system.
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