These are heady days for Cowboys coach Wade Phillips. His team has won four straight, coming off one of their best wins of the season. His team leads the NFC East. And his Twitter feed is humming with an astounding 14 tweets over the past three months. Whoa, stop being so chatty online, Coach! Phillips might even be in line for an extension when his contract runs out at the end of the season.
The local media has noticed Phillips’ dramatic turnaround from the Cowboys sluggish start, and one Dallas Morning News columnist, the fabulously named Jean-Jacques Taylor (he should design things!) wrote ahref=http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/spt/columnists/jtaylor/stories/111109dnspotaylorcol.3f11772.html>this piece detailing how Phillips, despite still having much to prove at crunch time, has slowly begun to gain the trust of the Cowboys faithful.
But I must take umbrage with how Jean-Jacques sets up his article. Allow me to break down his introduction, FJM-style.
If Wade Phillips had made the bevy of questionable second-half decisions Andy Reid did during Sunday's game, the outrage would be palpable.
Was the outrage not palpable towards Andy Reid after what Reid did on Sunday night? We chronicled the massive amount of criticism directed at Reid on Monday morning for his baffling decision to kick a field goal down seven points with no timeouts and only four minutes left on the clock. That was a stupid decision by Reid. No one let him off the hook. He got crushed for it.
Vitriol would fill the sports talk radio airwaves if two failed challenges had cost Phillips a pair of timeouts he could've used in a four-point loss. Criticism would reign supreme if Phillips had opted to kick a 52-yard field down while trailing by a touchdown with four minutes left and no guarantee the Cowboys would get the ball back.
The requests from fans and media for Jerry Jones to fire Wade would be too numerous to count. None of that, however, is happening, because Andy Reid gets the benefit of the doubt.
No, he doesn’t. People in Philly LOATHE Andy Reid. Vitriol DID fill the airwaves. I never heard an Eagles fan call in to say, “You know, I still adore Andy Reid!” after that fiasco. I’d post some of the comments from Philly fans from various sites across these here interwebs, but NBC has a strict policy against words that rhyme with dockmucker. Simply Google the phrase “Fire Andy Reid” and you’ll get 251,000 results. You’ll find petitions, organized protests, rants, and any number of creative death threats. No one in Philly is saying, “Well, He DID lose us that game by wasting timeouts and kicking a pointless field goal. But hey, let’s cut the guy some slack!” That doesn’t happen in Philly. Nelson Mandela wouldn’t even get slack from that town.
He's earned it by taking the Eagles to five NFC Championship Games and a Super Bowl while winning 10 playoff games this decade. Only New England's Bill Belichick has a higher winning percentage among active NFL coaches.
Yes, but Philly LOST four of those title games and the only Super Bowl Reid took them to. And they lost that Super Bowl because of bad coaching decisions by Reid.
Sports Connection
Connecting you to your favorite North Texas sports teams as well as sports news around the globe.
Philadelphia trusts Reid implicitly.
NO THEY DON’T. They so don’t. No one in Philly trusts Andy Reid. They would NOT let him babysit their kids, because those kids would end up being arrested.
Dallas doesn't trust Phillips. Phillips hasn't earned the benefit of the doubt.
This is true. Phillips still has a long way to go. Taylor continues his article by saying confidence in Phillips is growing and using lots of one-sentence paragraphs to illustrate his point. Which is all fine and dandy. But, again, it must be reiterated that Andy Reid is anything but an infallible figure in Philadelphia. And Wade Phillips and Andy Reid aren’t the diametric opposites he makes them out to be. Say what you want about Wade Phillips, I don’t see his team huddling for thirty minutes during the two-minute drill.
