The Eagles' Poorly Executed Audible

ANDY REID'S flip-flop refusal to let Donovan McNabb speak to the media yesterday is puzzling. Reid has long been credited as being a head coach who treats his players with respect, and certainly McNabb, a veteran who has carried himself with maturity and poise ever since being booed on draft day, has earned the right to do his own thing. The reason cited by Reid for canceling yesterday's presser was that he wanted his rehabbing quarterback to avoid distractions and concentrate on his work. Well, come on. How is sitting for 45 minutes and answering inane questions that he's already seen in print and heard on TV and the radio dozens of time going to keep McNabb from being ready for training camp?

If Reid instead wanted to protect his sometimes emotionally fragile player from questions about a quarterback controversy, that's equally ridiculous. Nobody with even a minimum amount of football sense thinks that Jeff Garcia should start over McNabb next season. (This explains why the topic has been much-debated on sports talk radio and noted breathlessly by TV sports anchors, where sports sense takes a back seat to, well, just about everything.) Garcia did a magnificent job running the Eagles' offense efficiently in McNabb's absence, but the team's unexpected playoff push happened because Reid decided to run the ball more and the defense finally figured out how to stop the rushing game. Plug McNabb into that system and good things should continue to happen. All he'd have needed to do yesterday was praise Garcia's performance, talk about preparing as hard as possible to be ready for 2007, and say he looks forward to returning. Why Reid was scared of that is difficult to fathom. This is one instance where he should have let McNabb call his own play.