Does it count now?

On draft day, I heard people say, "We won't start figuring out what we have until mini camp." Then all through the mini camp, the word was that nothing mattered until training camp. At the start of training camp, it turned into the beginning of hitting.

Tomorrow, hitting commences at Lehigh, but I'm thinking that won't really matter that much either. Until the season actually gets here, nothing is set in stone, nothing truly matters. Unless, of course, somebody gets injured.

There have been a few training camp injuries already this summer. The Jaguars center broke his ankle. Frank Gore, the supertalented San Fran running back, broke his hand and may or may not be ready for the start of the season (something to think about ahead of the FFL draft). A couple years ago it was Corell Buckhalter going down for the season with a training camp knee injury.

I was standing on the field today talking to Gordie Jones from the Allentown Morning Call, and playing what he aptly termed the "parlor game" of figuring out where the Eagles' toughest decisions will come. Five wide receivers or six? Four running backs or five, nine defensive linemen or 10, who's the backup returner, etc., etc.

It's a fun game, but when I thought about the start of the hitting season, I realized that it's pointless. Or more precisely, that it's impossible. It's virtually inevitable that there will be some nick, some bruise or sprain that will affect the decisions, making some decisions easier and others more difficult.

Hopefully, for the Eagles' sake, the injury doesn't affect the whole season. But let's be realistic. This is professional football. No team goes through an entire year without losing a player to injury. Last year is was Kearse and McNabb. The year before a ton of players. Who will it be in 2007? The answer(s) to that question will go a long way toward determining the success or failure of this season.

And if the Eagles are lucky, they won't find any answers for a while.

Marty Mornhinweg on the passing of Bill Walsh

I walked up about three minutes into the conversation, but I think he ended up repeating most of what he said early. The approximate questions are on parentheses.)

MORNHINWEG, JULY 29

(Was he excited to see Garcia playing well last year?)
He was excited that the Philadelphia Eagles were doing well, he was happy that Jeff was doing well.

(How will he be remembered?)
Not only building the dynasty and winning Super Bowls but the way he did it. Really was an innovator both on the field and off, with the way he did the personnel and the way he practiced. Everybody refers to the West Coast system. It's not only just the offensive plays, it's the way you practice, the way you meet, daily schedules, weekly schedules, monthly schedules, yearly schedules. On and on and on. He really developed that.

(Biggest influences on you as a coach?)
Andy Reid, Mike Holmgren and Bill Walsh were the three guys. I was offensive coordinator in San Francisco and he was general manager and it wouldn't have been real smart without me trying to grab him on a daily basis and try to talk football with him, and so we did that quite a bit.
He was a mentor for many, many coaches around the league and he enjoyed that.

(Best advice he ever gave you?)
He gave me an awful lot of advice throughout the years, and I can't remember any bad advice he gave me, so it was all good advice.

(He was always portrayed as the anti-Lombardi, the coach as teacher...)
I think much of that is true and the perception of him like that is true. However, he was a tough man, and the players that played for him and the coaches that coached for him will tell you that he was a tough man and he was a tough coach. However the perception was that he was a teacher, and he was a very gifted teacher.

(Best memories?)
There's two that click right into my mind. In training camp when he was a general manager and I was a coordinator, we’d grab 15 minutes or a half hour every day and we'd talk football. The other one was when the great Jerry Rice was playing his last game in Candlestick, and he came down with about two minutes left and the game basically was over. And we were going to go into our slowdown for a minute, and he says, ‘Hey, lets get Jerry one more.’ And we did. And the balloons flew, and we gave the game ball to Jerry. So those were the two that popped into my mind right away.

(TO caught 20 balls that day)
**Laughs** That was the day. But we got Jerry one more.

(Who called those plays?)
**Raises his hand** They were good plays, though.
I think people forget, Jerry, that day, I think he caught six for 80 or 90 yards, which was a good day. I was desperately trying to get him the football. I was trying to get him a couple touchdowns. If you remember, he got tackled down on the one or two twice.
But… anyways.

A crazy day in Lehigh

I thought today was going to be a breeze. Just one practice in the morning, get most of the essential stuff done, then wait for the veterans to wander in.

It started going badly early, with the jam on the Expressway. Practice itself was OK, and Faulkner actually played great, but the aftermath was a zoo, trying to get that midday update done. They also brought offensive coordinator Mary Mornhinweg to the podium for his press conference at the same time as the players were coming off the field, so we pretty much had to choose. Be there for the conference or talk to players. I left me recorder with Mornhinweg and took my notebook to the players. It worked out fine in the end.

But then Bill Walsh passed away after a long battle with leukemia, casting a pall for a while. The Eagles organization is actually a pretty thick branch of the tree that Walsh planted and nurtured with his singular genius. Andy was borderline wistful when talking about his first encounter with the man, recently finished with college football at San Francisco State. Mornhinweg was even more so, talking about Walsh and Jerry Rice's last game In San Fran as a 49er. I transcribed all of the conversation I got, and I'll post it a little later.

Meanwhile, the vets straggled in.

Brian Westbrook brought his hyperbaric chamber, which is basically this 10-foot neoprene tube with a humidifier or something that attaches to it. It's supposed to greatly aid in recovery, and it's what TO credited for his fast heal before the Super Bowl. Anyway, someone wondered aloud if Westbrook was smuggling TO into the Eagles dorms in that thing, but then we realized that he would probably be the last guy to be caught doing that. BWest doesn't need anybody siphoning his touches, and I think there are plenty of Birds fans behind him on that one.

We asked Takeo Spikes what was essential to bring to training camp and his answer was high quality toilet tissue and 300-thread-count bedsheets. Somewhere between then and the arrival of Brian Dawkins about 30 minutes later, those two distinct Spikes essentials melded into "300 rolls of toilet paper," and somebody whispered that down the lane to BDawk. His answer went something like, "Yeah, well, toilet paper is important... Wait, no way I'm talking about toilet paper." And with that, his mini-conference ended. Luckily, he'd already answered questions for a good seven minutes.

After that we all retired to the media center, where most of us bashed our heads repeatedly against the wall for three hours. The root problem was that the only thing of even remote consequence that had actually occurred all day was that Bill Walsh had died, and for that most of us were just feeding quotes to main stories done by some dude named Associated Press. Everything else was much ado about nothing. And there was a lot of it. I think it's actually easier to write about a little nothing than a lot, because then at least you know what BS you have to pump up into something it's not. With all the BS lying around Monday, it was impossible to know where to start.

But we all got through it, and looked forward to Tuesday, when we can all sleep in. It's another one-practice day, but this one's in the afternoon. Meaning we have the late crunch, but no earlhy-onset madness. Following that is the grind, beginning at 8:15 every morning. But after today, anything resembling order would be welcome.

Apparently, it's raining in Bethlehem

I'm not sure why yesterday's blog post didn't show up, but it's there now.

Anyway, I'm not actually at training camp today. It's one of my mandated days off, probably the last one I will actually take. It turns out to be a good day to be off, since the Eagles were rained off the practice field this morning, only to reconvene indoors. Donovan McNabb was the only player who didn't practice, and that was for the ever-present precautionary reasons. I guess it would be immensely stupid to let your franchise quarterback get hurt in less-than-ideal practice conditions, especially when the veterans aren't even here. After all, how important is it really that No. 5 have special chemistry with Micheal Gasperson or Zac Collie. In the event those receivers beat the odds and make the team, he'll only see the field one or two plays a game.

So while it may seem like Andy Reid is babying McNabb, it would really be silly for him to do anything else.

Yesterday Donovan looked fine. So did Kolb, the other focus of attention. Most of the wide receivers had their moments, including MHS grad Dereck Faulkner. Mr. Sound and Fury. Revolution No. 9. It seemed like he was primarily working the left side of the field, and my untrained eyes saw few mistakes. Collie and J.J. Outlaw both made some nice catches, but the highlight belonged to Jeremy Bloom, who has looked terrific at wide receiver. He caught a beautiful deep throw from Kolb, and he has tracked down virtually everything else. As Andy said in his press conference today, however, nothing really counts until he and everybody else gets hit a little bit. A football season is a war of attrition already, so it makes sense to put these guys under serious stress now, when it doesn't matter at all.

I didn't get over to watch the defensive drills much, but when they came to the main practice field for 7-on-7s, it was clear that the battle between Dustin Fox and C.J. Gaddis will be one of the best of camp. Gaddis probably has better coverage ability, having played a lot of corner at Clemson. But conversely, Fox may be a lot more honed in on the dafety position specifically. As I mentioned in the paper today, Fox had Bloom all lined up for an enormous hit Monday afternoon, after Bloom caught a short pass over the middle. Of course he pulled up and didn't deliver it, but I flashed back to the play in the first Dallas game last year, when Michael Lewis was loaded up to annihilate T.O., except that Owens dropped the pass.

Gaddis and Fox are both going for that fourth safety position behind the ageless Brian Dawkins, the enigmatic Sean Considine and the underappreciated Quintin Mikell. The second-place finished in that position battle will likelyt either be Goconged (placed on IR with an injury) or go to the practice squad if the Eagles think he can clear waivers.

Some folks really expect Mikell to push Considine for that starting job, but the Eagles coaching staff can be stubborn. Remember the Matt McCoy experiment? Considine has added like 20 pounds of muscle. At 212, he's the second-biggest safety in camp behind Chris Smith, the undrafted free agent from Florida International better known as the dud who sparked the brawl with Miami last year. If Considine keeps that bulk on he may be able to step up and stuff the run like a strong safety needs to. He's definitely one to keep an eye on, especially as the season goes on.

Today is the last day the veterans will have no presence at camp at all. They are all due to report tomorrow, then take the field for the first time Tuesday and don the pads on Wednesday. Tuesday is closed to fans. As it's the first time the entire team is on the field together, it's kind of a sacred moment. I'm not certain that's why it's closed to fans, but it's my best guess. Besides, there's only one practice that day, with two-a-days resuming on Wednesday. That's the day that folks have been pointing to as the moment things really begin, so it's also the day when all the radio stations and so forth are doing their shows live from Lehigh. I imagine it will be a media zoo on Wednesday, which is amazing since the first day of hitting was the day I covered back in 2000, and every day has been a bigger deal than that one was, hoopla-wise. It just shows how far the Eagles and media have both come in that short time.

I'll be back at it bright and early tomorrow morning. Check in at the C-P website aound lunchtime for a mid-day update, and I'll post here sometime between the forst and second practices.

TC, Day 2 -- "What did these people come to see?"

There were probably about 1,500 Eagles fans here today, watching a fraction of an NFL team practice without pads. I guess it's free, so nobody got fleeced out of any money unless you count the 20 bucks worth of gas some of them burn coming to Bethlehem and back. I really wonder how many of them knew what it was going to be about today, and how many were disappointed not to see Brian Westbrook or Takeo Spikes or Brian Dawkins lighting it up.

They did get to see Donovan McNabb, as promised, as well as Kevin Kolb and Chris Gocong, Nate Ilaoa and Jeremy Bloom, among others. In all, I'd say about 15 of the individual players on the practice field this morning will have an impact on the game field this upcomig season. Maybe 10. Maybe even fewer. Hard to tell.

Defensive coordinator Jim Johnson and McNabb both spoke from the "podium" after practice, and Five was actually pretty good, maybe because ESPN was here. Kevin Roberts will cover the whole McNabb angle with his column for Sunday's paper, but I will say I was glad to see he got rid of the Abe Lincoln beard.

Training Camp Day 1

It has been seven years since I covered a day of Eagles training camp at Lehigh, trailing after Steve Patton of the Reading Eagle as a summer intern in Andy Reid's second season as head coach. Since then, this thing has about tripled in size, if the apparati surrounding the pracice fields is any indication. I remember it as a relatively low-key thing, with about 1,500 fans along the outskirts of the field. No elaborate parking system. No dozen tents and entranceway with showroom cars. No bazillion port-o-lets all smelling their antiseptic (it's early) smell.

Of course, I wouldn't have seen half of this extracirricular stuff if I hadn't gotten lost. And there were really only about five fans in attendance to day, and honestly I'm not sure what even they were doing there. There was nothing to see.

Except Dereck Faulkner's boots. Spray painted gold with big fat purple laces, those kicks were the most interesting snippet from hours of standing in front of a nondescript college dorm waiting for (over)grown men to check in. Faulkner is a Moorestown High graduate, so I basically plan to update his progress just about every day until he makes the team, is cut or placed on the practice squad. But if he was looking for a little hook to make every writer in the gaggle mention him in the notebook, that was a masterstroke. Pull out those shiny fraternity boots on a day when there's about a five percent chance that anything will actually happen.

Dereck Faulkner, media genius.

The most relevent actual news of the day was that No. 5 will wear a brae on his knee when he practices tomorrow, even though he went without during the OTAs. Andy Reid played it off as a simple precautionary matter, and that McNabb wil likely chuck the brace for the first game. But as a veteran of mutiple knee injuries, I don't totally buy it.

A brace is supposed to support certain ligaments and tendons that might be weak, supplementing their strength with the strength of rubber, plastic and even steel, depending on the kind of brace. It'll prevent a certain range of motions and pressures on that knee, so that when you take the thing off, the knee isn't ready for them. There's a dependency on the brace. At least that was my experience. After a while, I felt more likely to hurt my knee if I wore the brace for a long time than if I didn't, in part because my confidence level in the joint was based on reality and not trust in some extra thing.

I'm sure Donovan will have a super-awesome-perfect brace that I could never have dreamed of, one that actually strengthens your knee, makes you smarter and cleans your teeth all at the same time. But nonetheless, when I heard the news after noting his bracelessness back in June, that was a red flag. Could it be he overdid it in Arizona?

We'll find out tomorrow, when we venture out into the heat for the first two-a-day. It will be nice to watch once the hitting starts, knowing that decisions are actually being made on what we're seeing. Back in the mini camps and OTAs, the refrain was "wait until camp," and "nothing really matters until camp." Now camp is here, and it matters.

Camp Eve: A Semi-Educated Guess

The countdown to camp has quickly gone from months to weeks to days, and now it's down to hours. Rookies and selected veterans -- apparently including No. 5 himself -- will report to Lehigh tomorrow afternoon, ahead of Saturday's initial practices.

The Eagles roster is something like 87 names large right now, but that won't last the month. They cut down to 75 first, and then a few days later on Sept. 1, down to a season-ready 53. Here's my prediction for that 53-man roster, based on conversations, history, speculation and math.

OFFENSE
QB -- Donovan McNabb, A.J. Feeley, Kevin Kolb
RB -- Brian Westbrook, Correll Buckhalter, Tony Hunt
FB -- Thomas Tapeh
TE -- L.J. Smith, Brent Celek
WR -- Reggie Brown, Kevin Curtis, Jason Avant, Jeremy Bloom, Hank Baskett, Greg Lewis
OT -- Jon Runyan, William Thomas, Winston Justice, Pat McCoy
OG -- Shawn Andrews, Todd Herremans, Max Jean-Gilles, Scott Young
C -- Jamaal Jackson, Nick Cole

DEFENSE
DE -- Jevon Kearse, Trent Cole, Darren Howard, Victor Abiamiri, Juqua Thomas
DT -- Mike Patterson, Brodrick Bunkley, Ian Scott, Montae Reagor
LB -- Takeo Spikes, Jeremiah Trotter, Chris Gocong, Omar Gaither, Tank Daniels, Matt McCoy, Dedrick Roper
CB -- Lito Sheppard, Sheldon Brown, Will James, Joselio Hanson, Dustin Fox
S -- Brian Dawkins, Sean Considine, Quintin Mikell, C.J. Gaddis

SPECIALISTS
PK -- David Akers
P -- Saverio Rocca
LS -- Jon Dorenbos

I think that by the time the season starts, LB Stewart Bradley, CB Rashad Barksdale and RB Nate Ilaoa will have developed mysterious injuries that land them on Injured Reserve. In other words, they'll Goconged. They may not be ready, but as draft picks, there's no guarantee they could make it to the practice squad.

There will obviously be several young players who will end up on the practice squad, perhaps even some for the second time (I'm not sure, but I think two seasons is the limit for the practice squad.) Personally, I'm rooting for WR Dereck Faulkner, our local Moorestown connection. It all depends what the coaches think they may need as the season rolls on, and who stands out at Lehigh.

The veteran players I see losing out are DE Jerome McDougle, DT LaJuan Ramsey, TE Matt Schobel, RB Ryan Moats, and of course punter Dirk Johnson.

McDougle was shot a couple of years ago, and he looked shot by the end of last season. Ramsey goes because I just don't see them keeping 10 defensive linemen with the ucertainty at linebacker. Schobel goes because the Eagles drafted Celek as L.J. insurance, and they have to find out if he can play. Moats is gone because, even though the Birds finished with five backs last year, that extra slot moves over to the receivers this year because Bloom is the returner and not Reno Mahe. Finally, Johnson is gone because I feel that Rocca can come close to matching his consistency, and Dirk didn't punt all that well in 2006.

The guys I thought hard about for various reasons were Matt McCoy, Buckhalter, Lewis and Tapeh, and I would still not be shocked to see any one of them cut.

Obviously, preseason injuries are almost inevitable, and things will happen to change this picture in the next month. If this is the team the Eagles go to Green Bay with, however, how would you feel? There are no real weaknesses. There are some stone-cold gambles, expecially with Bunkley and Gocong, but they're not necessarily bad bets, especially given the contingency plans in place.

Honestly, as a fan, I would feel pretty decent.

Four days to Lehigh

In Sunday's edition of the C-P I tried to answer five of the biggest questions that might be resolved by the upcoming training camp. One question that will be answered as early as this week is whether the Birds will have any holdouts, as they did a yer ago with Brodrick Bunkley.

Well, it won't be Victor Abiamiri, and it won't be Nate Ilaoa (as if Nasti would have risked his chance to make the team with contract concerns).

Nope. If it's going to happen in 2007, it will be Kevin Kolb.

From the moment he was drafted until the OTA days, Kolb was the belle of the ball. Everybody wanted him, wanted to talk with him and get his take on just about anything. By the end of the mini camps, his profile had receded to something more befitting an NFL team's emergency quarterback. But if he holds out -- and as the franchise's presumptive Quarterback of the Future, he does have some premise for getting paid -- Kolb will be right back in the spotlight again.

I have to say at this point that I don't think it's going to happen. I believe that in the next couple of days the Eagles will announce that they have reached terms with Kolb, and the Birds' top draft pick will be in Bethlehem on Friday morning, ready to continue his education. I'm not naive enough to believe just because Kolb is personalbly polite and placating, that his agent will be of that same even temperment. In fact, he probably wouldn't be a great agent if he were.

I just think that the Eagles organization is an image-conscious, intrigue-tamping operation, and with with so little between it and a non-story, Andy Reid, Joe Banner and Tom Heckert are going to close the deal. It's a question of control.

If Kolb holds out, the story and the focus moves away from the training camp practice field and to wherever Kolb is. And in that case, the young Texan could possible say something that could puncture one of the several thin skins in the locker room and the front office. It's hard to know what the Birds dislike more, overpaying or negative attention.

One week to Lehigh

Seven days from this morning, the Eagles will open their 2007 Training Camp in Bethlehem, Pa. A few weeks later marks the beginning of the preseason, and after four more weeks, the season opener in Green Bay.

So if the Eagles are an unofficial regional religion, we're about a week out from the start of Lent. And the devout are restless.

With the Phillies wallowing around the .500 mark, the Sixers and Flyers coming off atgrocious seasons, and some promising signs left over from the Birds' mini camps, the anticipation seems like it's a little more amped, at least more than last year.

A lot of the preseason prognostications have the Birds as the class of the NFC East and one of the best three teams in the conference. Which is a little like being the Cleveland Cavaliers, but still, SOMEBODY has to go to the Super Bowl. So why not Philadelphia?

If there is an answer to that question, it might show up at Lehigh. A week from now, things are going to start mattering a whole lot more.