PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. – There was a moment during the Philadelphia Eagles’ penultimate drive of Super Bowl XXXIX when Eagles center Hank Fraley rushed up to the line of scrimmage to get ready to snap the ball. Then he looked behind him and saw his teammates waving him back to the huddle, as the clock continued to wind down.
So at least someone was attacking the Eagles’ comeback effort with a sense of urgency. It just wasn’t coach Andy Reid.
Even Monday, 11 hours after the Eagles lost, 24-21, to the New England Patriots, Reid still had no explanation for why his team wasn’t in its no-huddle offense, trailing by 10 points with 5:40 remaining. It was a mind-boggling decision that even left some of his own players speechless, and probably cost the Eagles a chance to win their first championship in 45 years.
“Well, you know, I’m trying to remember back on that. I put that away a little bit,” Reid said a few hours before the Eagles checked out of their hotel. “But we did try to get it going. I can’t remember. I can’t detail the circumstances why it didn’t work as well as it should have.”
Chances are there are many Eagles fans who can help refresh his memory. The Eagles were trailing 24-14 and had two timeouts left when they got the ball at their 21 with 5:40 left in the game. But instead of trying to move downfield quickly, they went on a long, methodical drive filled with short passes. And they huddled before almost every play.
When they did finally score on a 30-yard touchdown pass from Donovan McNabb to Greg Lewis that cut their deficit to three points, they had eaten up almost four precious minutes and left just 1:48 on the clock. By the time they got the ball back after a three-and-out by the Patriots, the Eagles were stuck at their 4-yard line with just 46 seconds to go.
After the game, no one seemed to have a reasonable explanation for the clock mismanagement. Reid said they were trying to hurry up, but “it was the way things worked out.” McNabb said they couldn’t do it because they were waiting for receivers to return from their deep routes. And right tackle Jon Runyan said the Eagles didn’t want to rush because they didn’t want to make any mistakes. He added, “It wasn’t a big deal.”
Tell that to the Eagles fans who were moaning at the game or at home screaming “Hurry up!” at their TVs.
At some point, maybe, Reid will have an answer for what happened, but he didn’t have one Monday. Asked if he wished he had handled that drive better and left the Eagles more time for a comeback, he said, “Well, you know, you’d love to have back the second-to-last interception there. It might have been a little different if that were the case.” He was talking about Tedy Bruschi’s pick that ended the Eagles’ previous drive.
The drive he can’t remember, incidentally, doesn’t represent Reid’s only bizarre decision. He mismanaged the clock at the end of the first half, too, when the Eagles had three timeouts and the ball with 1:10 remaining. Reid didn’t use a timeout until there were 10 seconds left. Asked about that after the game, Reid said, “I don’t remember that at all, to be honest with you.”
There were also issues with his play-calling, which included just six running attempts in the second half. (“I need to go back and kind of reevaluate what I was doing from the play-calling standpoint,” he admitted.) And then there was his decision to rush 11 men at the Patriots’ punter with 55 seconds left in the game, leaving no one back to return the football, which rolled dead at the Eagles’ 4.
“We made an attempt to stay aggressive with him and go after him and try to block the punt and put ourselves in even better position to get a field goal or a touchdown,” Reid said. “It didn’t work out.”
For Reid, in his first Super Bowl as a head coach, not many of his decisions did.
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