Your 2018 Eagles: Flipping Off Opposing Coaches and Running Away from the Media
Source – The visitors’ locker room at the Superdome is split into two rooms – a larger one for the offense and a smaller one for the defense. When the door opened after the Eagles’ embarrassing 48-7 loss to the Saints, and a few media members walked into the defensive side, Nigel Bradham had a message for those who opted to turn right.
“Don’t even come on this side,” the Eagles linebacker said. “Go to the other side.”
It’s unclear what Bradham meant. … An answer was unmanageable because Bradham, once the most accountable of Eagles, slipped out, much as he has all season.
You can tell a lot about a team in the immediate moments after a devastating defeat. The Eagles had been treading water through the first nine games, convinced they were better than their losing record indicated, because their five losses were each by one score. …
Fletcher Cox, voted captain for the first time this year, was one of the first Eagles to leave the locker room without talking. Jason Peters and Brandon Graham, captains last season, declined to answer questions. …
Of the locker room no-shows, the biggest surprise was Malcolm Jenkins. … He did his paid interview with a local station, and gave a few terse responses when stopped by a few reporters in the tunnel outside the locker room, but that was it.
[T]here were also signs of finger pointing. Defensive end Chris Long swung his arm toward the secondary after Mark Ingram rushed 14 yards untouched into the end zone – as if he were saying, “Someone, please, cover the left side of the field.”
Rasul Douglas held his arms up at safety Corey Graham after he failed to get over in time to help the cornerback on receiver Michael Thomas’ 23-yard touchdown grab.
I did NOT see this coming. Especially coming just a couple of days after Jason Kelce put the Eagles on blast for their lack of “accountability.” And here you have them, as a team, en masse, getting disintegrated in all three phases, pointing fingers at each other on the field and then being as unaccountable as unaccountability gets afterwards. Scattering like the roaches in the hotel WEEI put me up in at Super Bowl XLIX rather than take the heat.
This isn’t just a matter of feeling bad for those poor media wretches who didn’t get the exclusive on why Malcolm Jenkins flipped The State Bird of Massachusetts at Sean Payton. I didn’t care about reporters when they bitched about Nomar and his red line or 100,000 whiny complaints about Bill Belichick blowing off their questions and I’m not about to start now.
This isn’t about playing grabass with the media; it’s about being stand up guys. It’s about not turning tail and running from adversity. It’s about facing the fire, not dropping your weapon and fleeing the battlefield. The Eagles have had a lot to say this year. The most dangerous place in the world to be in 2018 was between a Philly player and a microphone. But now that things are looking grim, it’s all middle fingers and the sounds of doors hitting them in the ass on the way out of the locker room. It’s sad. You hate to see it. It’s not really what you look for in a champion, but some teams can take the adversity, stick together and bounce back from it and some can’t. That’s why some teams are in the Super Bowl hunt every single year – OK, one team – and the others aren’t.
Again, let me just say I hope Eagles players are still having fun. In the end, that’s all that truly matters.