Mission Statement

For anyone who actually reads this:

This blog will be dedicated to viewing the 2005 Eagles and NFL season from a slightly different angle. Sports, especially baseball, have broken into two camps over the past decade: the stathead versus the meathead. Here we'll seek the middle path to enlightenment. First impressions will be balanced by the truth of the numbers; sample size will mix in with who just flat out brought it that week.
The stathead approach may have been birthed to look at baseball, but there is a small and growing influence of stats on football. The most obvious example is fantasy football, where stats sub-in for a player's true quality and fans' loyalties are blurred by their season-long mercenaries. A deeper look at what player's are contributing on the field is offered by the good folks over at www.footballoutsiders.com and in their book Football Prospectus 2005. This is Bill James style football; stats for the sophisticate. Here we'll borrow liberally from their analysis (always giving credit where credit is due, of course) as a building block for a deeper look into pro football.
The meathead view is everywhere: you had to listen to them in high school, you hear them call sports-radio, ESPN hires them almost exclusively. They compete to wear out the same tired cliches: "Team X is all fired up about what Player Y said this week!", "When you have a leader like insert name here, you can't help but bring it each and every week!", and of course, "Michael Vick is changing the QB position in the NFL!" Lots of exclamation points, lots of yelling, lots of Sean Salsbury spittle on the camera. If you've read this far you must be as tired of this type of "analysis" as I am, still cliches get that way for a reason. Football is an incredibly emotional game, and sometimes it really is as simple as who wants it more.
In Philadelphia, we've developed a hard-earned rep for being borderline psycotic about the Birds. Underlooked is that Philadelphia is the home of some of the best minds in Pro Football; writers and commentators who can cut through a coaches tape quicker than some NFL coaches. Not coincidentaly, the Philly 'burbs are the home of NFL films, a petri dish of football insight. Here the stathead and meathead can find common ground in the great masters like Ray Didinger, Steve Sabol, and whoever came up with that soundtrack. EaglesAskew will be my attempt to put a modern twist on their classic outlook.