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.