Palm Feathers and PPW tag-team on Eagles Kool-Aid...and the thin line between super information and media slavery...

Open Mike Week continues at the Eagles Eye Neptune Lounge... Today we welcome two veteran posters as guest writers--- Palm Feathers (aka Frank Bozek), and PPW (PhillyPhanWest, aka Reed Skinner)--- who actually have done most of their Eagles commentary over at the mothership, PE.com...

Palmy and PPW will perform as a tag team, since their takes are nicely in sync with a matter of growing importance to serious Eagles fans--- in this age of super-information, how do we find the balance in what we are being told about our team with what's actually the truth about our team?


Palm Feathers in deep thought in his Florida garden as he pondered his essay...

 Kool-Aid ... by Palm Feathers  (Frank Bozek) 

I am a ‘Homer’ – probably the BIGGEST  Kool-Aid  drinker in this house. I not only ADMIT to this but I’m PROUD of it. This little Blurb is about what has filled my glass this season. Players, statistics and performance evaluations are better gotten from anyone here but me. I’d like to focus on the continuity, management and leadership of our Eagles.

Continuity – These are very talented, highly paid "children" on that field. Our Birds have gone through three years of coaching and personnel changes. Their entire lives have been devoted to conforming to a system through Middle and High School, College and into the NFL. Last season demonstrated that the changes and lack of continuity were taking a toll.

Management – The first really positive sign I saw last year was that little ‘scuffle’ during that game between the coaches. When those coaches started ‘marking’ their territory that demonstrated to me that they were taking ownership and control over their area of the Team. Coach Reid, a VERY GOOD manager in my opinion, provided these coaches with the authority and security to assert themselves. That did not look like panic or frustration. In my opinion the players responded to it in a good way.

Leadership – This can ONLY come from the players. I didn’t want to bring up player names but the last leader I saw on this team was Dawkins. In my experience you can never predict who will emerge as a leader – you can only report on it after it has happened. Put a group of people together and observe who will pick fights (constructively), who will stick out their neck and who shows that he is acting on beliefs, not acting on what he thinks the others will want to hear. Watch the guys on the sideline when the game is not going well – the player ‘stalking’ up and down like a big cat, the guy who is getting right in the faces of whoever he thinks needs it – there’s your leader. The last thing that leader cares about is making friends. Watch Brady or EITHER Manning sometime when a few passes have been dropped. As we all know Peer Pressure is a tremendous motivator.

Last season in the absence of these factors the players reverted back to all that they had left – their own talent. They played as individuals not as a team – and a team of so-so’s that are in-tune with each other will win the day over a team of talented individuals. With the loss of Coach Johnson AND Dawkins two legs of a three-legged stool were removed from our Defense. We all saw how that worked at first. We also need to see a leader emerge on offense instead of the pure-talent efforts we have seen since for a long time, before McNabb was brought in.

So – MY CUP RUNNETH OVER this year because I think I am beginning to see all three of the above points emerge, from Mid-Season on last year.  As a matter of fact, in light of Coach Reid keeping the Coaching Staff together and the Free Agent and Draft picks – there is Kool-Aid all over my kitchen floor.

I am not a ‘Super Bowl or Bust’ kind of guy but if they ever do win it all my only problem will be whether or not to pay the folks in my shop for the week that it will be closed due to the fact that I will have been 911‘d - right after the last few seconds of that game are over.

" I gotta feeling  - that tonight's gonna be a good night...”


PPW follows up with a real interesting look at how modern communications technology is changing the way we get our Kool-Aid in many alternative flavors...and how we need to be aware of the media slavery traps, and still rely upon our own eyes and critical thinking processes in order to be truly informed.

Sports Fans in the Information Age...  by PPW (Reed Skinner)

It used to be that finding info about your favorite sports team was as easy as finding hen’s teeth. This held especially true if you lived away from the team’s core market. Like most things news-related in the “olden” days, there were few sources to gather from and none of them offered anything in “real” time. There were printed publications available, Sports Illustrated, The Sporting News to name a couple, that offered insight and coverage, but they were generalized in that coverage in that you received a mere fraction of the info desired. Another downside to the printed word is that by the time you’re reading it, it’s…….well, old news. Sure, you may have been lucky to have your favorite player on the cover once in his career, followed by half a page of reading, but it only left the fan wanting more.

Television offered a glimpse of improved sports coverage. Regional stations did a decent job of covering teams in their market but left much to be desired for fans of teams out of the area. ABC’s ‘Wide World of Sports’ did a fine job of sports coverage, as general as it may have been, and was about the only TV outlet available on regular TV programming. In the 60's and 70’s, cable TV had yet to find its way to most of America and satellite was still quite expensive for the average household (not to mention it required one to permanently mount with concrete, a dish about the same size the scientists that search for extra-terrestrial intelligence use in your front yard!). Cable and satellite grew however, and a big part of that growth was sports. ESPN entered our homes in 1979 and with it came exponential growth. Several others followed and soon the fan was given a broad spectrum of sports viewing pleasure piped right into their living rooms.

While TV, cable and satellite programming offered more sports viewing options than ever before, some fans were still left without the total coverage that they craved. For football fans, Sundays were the only chance to catch a glimpse of their team in action, and that chance was usually quite slim. The networks offered highlights and peppered in a few stats but they still didn’t offer much in the way of total team coverage. Monday Night Football also offered a chance for the displaced fan to see their team in action but, depending on the programming, that could be only once a season (or less).

Sports fans needed more. Much more. A new information medium was growing like wildfire in the 80’s---the computer. While many viewed the home computer as a fad and a fluke (much like television itself when it first arrived) others saw the potential that the computer had--- and ran with it. While most of us stayed comfortably entrenched in the stone ages, others were hard at work giving us one of the greatest inventions in the history of mankind-The Internet.       Now some will argue that the augmented breast is the greatest invention of all time-and that is debatable-but it is also another blurg for another time.

The advent of the internet has opened up the entire universe for us-right at our fingertips. Information by the terabyte is available on a daily basis, for any subject you can imagine. Now the sports fan can access anything related to their favorite team 24/7. Games, stats, player bios, highlights etc. etc. etc. Imagine yourself clear back in 1995 wondering what is going on in Training Camp. With the exception of driving there, you were in the dark, never knowing who looked good and who didn’t.The internet gives us what we want, when we want and how we want it. This has opened doors not only for fans around the country, but fans worldwide to celebrate the beloved sports they hold dear. No longer are the barriers of geography and time relevant to the viewing and enjoying of sports related information. Next time you see Al Gore, give him a pat on the back for his (self-proclaimed) wonderful invention.


What PPW does there is make me think---The Internet and wireless phone devices bring more Eagles info (and Kool-Aid) in real-time now, faster than ever... but now more than ever, the discerning Eagles fan has to be even more patient in forming an accurate picture as he or she weighs the incoming evidence. There's more hearsay testimony now than ever, and more rumor that grows falsely upon hearsay. The new age of sports information requires sifting through more and more discovery---much of which is eventually found to be lacking in credibility. As we get more info, we find more evidence that is simply not admissible.

At least in the old days of the Sporting News and SPORT Magazine and SI, by the time you got the story in print, it was usually right... and properly fact-checked by professional editors.

Next up in Open Mike Week--- Dr. Funt, T-Boner and a rumor of Jerky in the house!