The teams most frequently mentioned as potential destinations for Donovan McNabb (if he were to be traded) are the Arizona Cardinals and the Minnesota Vikings. Both teams have quality at the receiver position, the tight end position as well as at running back. And with actual and potential retirements at their quarterback positions (and incredible uncertainty in the heirs apparent, Matt Leinart and Tarvaris Jackson), it makes sense that both playoff-caliber teams could benefit greatly from the addition of McNabb. Both teams are young as well, which means the prospect of grabbing draft picks in return for McNabb makes them appealing trading partners for the Eagles.

San Jose Mercury News writer, Tim Kawakami, made the case today for why the addition of McNabb would make so much sense for the San Francisco 49ers. The Niners are a team that went 8-8 last season in a division that only has one other competent team, the Arizona Cardinals. Their quarterback, Alex Smith, has yet to live-up to his potential as the 1st-overall pick out of Utah in 2005. The mere presence of Mike Singletary as head coach means the team will focus on playing good defensive football. Most fittingly, however, for the McNabb trade scenario is the presence of tight end Vernon Davis, running back Frank Gore and receiver Michael Crabtree. In other words, all this team needs is a quarterback.

The mere realization of this on the Eagles’ part makes a return on a McNabb trade even better. Word on the street is that McNabb would garner a 2nd-round pick in return (along with pocket change). But that’s because right now, the Cardinals are really the only team that makes sense for all parties involved. With the Minnesota situation unresolved for obvious reasons, the addition of San Francisco to the mix revitalizes a multi-team market for McNabb. And the best part about it from the Eagles’ perspective is that San Francisco and Arizona are the two best teams in their division; read: bidding war. It’s almost assured that (assuming he’s traded to one of them) the team who gets McNabb will be the favorite to win the NFC West. Hence more in return for the Eagles.

Obviously this is mere speculation but speculation that makes sense for all parties involved. Either Arizona or San Francisco gets the piece they need, McNabb’s happy (read: contract extention) because he lands on a contender and the Eagles get better picks coming their way because of both other teams’ competitive proximity. In other words, a win-win-win.

Mr. Personality is down in Miami getting ready for the Pro Bowl. Despite the rigors that entails, McNabb took a few moments out of his busy morning to share some of his thoughts with the Inquirer. And what’s on his mind is a return to the Eagles. McNabb does have a year remaining on his contract and he probably sees the defeat of the entire Eagles’ fan base as his most pressing challenge. To that end he said, among other things, “I love this team and I love being around these guys and competing. I think good things could happen for us.”

Meanwhile, rumor has it that a McNabb-to-Minnesota trade may be in the works in Brett Favre retires. Of course, with the way Favre does things we may never know whether that’ll happen. While this scenario seems to make sense for all parties involved (most notably the members of the Torresdale Social and Benevolent Club), the fact that it’s contingent upon Brett Favre making a decision makes it about as expedient as waiting for Godot. So come on back, Donnie! After all, who loves you more than we do?

Word on the street is that the Eagles are going to trade Donovan McNabb for 5 first-round picks. They are rumored to be Jimmy Clausen, Taylor Mays, Ndamukong Suh, Dez Bryant and Ronaldo McClain. If this is true, Joe Banner et al may final be committing to winning.

Let me begin by saying that the following comparison is between Donovan McNabb and NFL Hall of Fame quarterbacks who’ve played during the Super Bowl era. This does not mean that I believe McNabb is a HOF-caliber quarterback at this point. Nor is it intended to side with either party in the Eleven Years War that McNabb and the City of Philadelphia have had to endure since he was drafted. Rather, this comparison is intended to provoke some thought and provide some perspective, two ideas entirely foreign to most Eagles fans.

There are 18 Hall of Fame quarterbacks who’ve played in the NFL since the inception of the Super Bowl. Taken together, those players have amassed 216 seasons and they’ve won 23 Super Bowls. This means that, on average, Hall of Fame quarterbacks win a Super Bowl every 9.4 seasons they play. Donovan McNabb, as you know, is yet to win a Super Bowl in his 11 seasons as the Eagles quarterback which means he’s about a season and a half behind the pace set by the game’s all-time greats.

Almost half of those Super Bowl wins (11) belong to only 3 players: Troy Aikman (3), Joe Montana (4) and Terry Bradshaw (4). If you remove them from the equation, the other 15 players win Super Bowls every 14.5 seasons played, a pace which McNabb is well-ahead of. In fact, Aikman played 9 seasons without winning the Lombardi Trophy, Montana played 11 seasons without winning and Bradshaw played 10 seasons. So among the winningest quarterbacks in Super Bowl history, they average 10 seasons in their careers where they haven’t won it all. To date, that makes them 1 season more efficient than McNabb.

Of course, none of this really matters because it could be forever until McNabb wins one. Assuming that happens, he’ll be in the company of 7 HOF QBs who’ve never won it all. So at present, more than one third of the quarterbacks in the Hall have failed to win a Super Bowl. They are George Blanda, Dan Fouts, Dan Marino, Fran Tarkenton, Sonny Jurgensen, Warren Moon and Jim Kelly and they have played, on average, 12 seasons in the Super Bowl era (the ratio is even larger when you consider Blanda only played one season at quarterback in the SB era). So if McNabb were a Hall of Fame-caliber guy, he’d be well within his rights to play 1 more season without winning a Super Bowl and still have done as well as a third of the quarterbacks already in.

Finally, among all 18 players, there are 193 seasons played where no Super Bowl was won. When you do the math, the magic result is 10.9 seasons played with no SB, virtually the exact same number of seasons McNabb has been in the NFL and hasn’t won the big one. More simply put, the Hall of Fame is willing to allow its member quarterbacks 11 fruitless seasons (and a third of their ranks no Super Bowls at all). Considering their standard is the highest there is, do you think yours might need a little adjusting?

Bodog.com lists Donovan McNabb as a 1/5 favorite to be the Eagles starting QB in Game 1 of the 2010 season. With apologies to the dreamers who’d rather see Kevin Kolb, he’s currently a 7/2 underdog. And taking up the rear, the field is a 5/1 dog so there are still a few billion other possibilities.

As for Michael Vick, he’s a slight favorite to be traded (10/11), versus being released (1/1) or being on the 2010 team (13/4). So there you have it, the ‘10 Eagles quarterback (sorry, no odds on Jeff Garcia) controversy solved months in advance.

The issue of Donovan McNabb’s future was raised by yours truly yesterday. Following up on that today is the Daily News’ Rich Hofmann, who titles his piece on the subject “McNabb looks to be on his way out.” Hofmann describes the writing on the wall surrounding McNabb’s offseason raise, the presence of Kevin Kolb and perhaps most intriguingly, he compares #5 to some other elite quarterbacks statistically.

Whether the McNabb lovers outweigh the haters may no longer be enough to keep McNabb around. The mere presence of the love/hate relationship this town has with McNabb’s titleless team may be enough to see him out if the Eagles don’t make a deep playoff run. I don’t know whether this is a good or a bad thing, but one thing’s for sure: McNabb’s performance tomorrow and in the weeks to follow (if there are weeks to follow) may provide a rare look at an 11-year veteran auditioning for a job.

Regardless of what happens on Saturday night in Dallas, the odds are not in the Eagles’ favor to win the Super Bowl this season, which brings us to the perennial question surrounding this team at the familiar, disappointing end to each campaign: is McNabb the guy to lead the team to its first Super Bowl win? Unlike other possible first-round opponents, the Cowboys bring added pressure because of the rivalry between the two franchises and so the fallout from an Eagles opening-round loss would be even greater that if they were to lose to, say, Green Bay or Carolina.

To make the gravity surrounding the game even heavier, it brings with it the possibility that Dallas will have, for all intents and purposes, ruined the Eagles’ entire season by beating them 3 times. Don’t win it all in a year when you probably didn’t really have a shot to? We’re still angry but we can live with that if we think about it objectively (a big ‘if’ in this town). But cap the season with two losses to the Cowboys including a decisive one that makes the Eagles golfers for the foreseeable future? Completely unacceptable.

Much is made of Donovan McNabb’s complicity in the Eagles’ relative lack of success. A person’s perception of his contribution to the team’s fates over the years depends on whether his career is viewed in a half-full or half-empty way. On the positive side, McNabb is kind of like the diet version of Jim Kelly: great career numbers but no rings (though he’s only sniffed the Super Bowl once, an odor several quarterbacks can describe). And on the negative side, with the expectations of a town that’s never won the Super Bowl (while the other 3 teams in their division have all won multiple Lombardi trophies), McNabb’s stats mean little because they don’t correspond with a championship.

The complicated reality of the quarterback position is that it is one of eleven positions on the offense, and one of 22 roles that make up the majority of plays in a football game. Of course the signal caller is going to be the lightning rod or the hero but that depends more on the players, coaches and quality of opposition around him than it does on the QB’s perceived will to win games. Is the quarterback position more important than the other positions on offense? Probably it is. But the idea that fans have in their heads about the quarterback being the John Wayne of the team is a popular myth stemming from an inability to view the unfolding of a game as a function of many more moving parts.

Donovan McNabb has been at times in his career an excellent quarterback. At other times (like last week) he hasn’t been so good. There are, of course, a number of quarterbacks who have been so outstanding that their performances transcend their roles and their teams. Some of them would be John Elway, Tom Brady and Joe Montana. In fairness, Donovan McNabb does not belong in that group. With that said, however, none of those players won Super Bowls by themselves. They all played for teams that were probably better than any Eagles team McNabb has played on.

So if the Eagles lose on Saturday there will be a very vocal movement (maybe even more so than usual) to end the McNabb experiment. Whether that’s fair to him given the cast around him doesn’t matter because of the role of the quarterback; indeed, the perception of leadership on the football field through the quarterback position is, for right or wrong, exactly that, a role. And so going forward with McNabb, the question has to be whether he’s played that role as effectively as he could have. When you think about it in those terms, perhaps Saturday really is McNabb’s last stand as an Eagle.

Well, the only good thing to come out of yesterday’s loss to Dallas was that my prediction of an 11-5 season was spot on. Other than my genius being unveiled yet again, there weren’t exactly a thousand points of light in Irving, Texas. The Eagles were thoroughly manhandled by the Cowboys which capped possibly the most telling fact about how good the Eagles are: they finished the season without a win over a playoff team.

Why does that matter? Well, technically it doesn’t. The NFL isn’t beholden to the beauty-pageant framework of determining a champion in the way college football is. At the end of the day, teams’ wins and losses are the only things that matter in terms of their positioning in a run towards the Super Bowl.

With all that said, what better way to judge a playoff team’s likeliness to advance in the playoffs than looking at their recent record against other playoff teams? Unfortunately for the Birds, the Rams, Chiefs, Giants and Redskins will not be in the postseason. But the Cowboys will. So will the Saints and so will the Chargers. In fact, if the Eagles are going to make the Super Bowl they’re going to have to beat the Cowboys (whom they’ve lost to twice) and they’re likely going to have to beat New Orleans in Louisiana (they got crushed 48-22 by the Saints in Week 2, at the Linc).

While much is made of the apparent historical difficulty of beating a team 3 times in a season (what Dallas would need to do in order to advance next week), 4 teams have done exactly that during the past decade. Remember, of course, that in order for a team to beat another one 3 times in a season, both teams would have to make the playoffs. That means that both teams are pretty good, as they’ve both advanced to the postseason. Therefore the relative disparity between the teams is theoretically fairly slim and so the likeliness is that one squad shouldn’t be 3-games better than the other.

So where are the bright spots for the Eagles? Certainly Brent Celek is one as his lone ability to catch balls over the middle makes him a wildly-erratic quarterback’s best friend. And assuming Dallas’ secondary falls asleep, DeSean Jackson can run his singularly-effective 100-yard dash route (whether McNabb can refrain from overthrowing him is another question). Other than that, the Eagles don’t have too much to bank on.

The irony of the Eagles’ approach is that they don’t have the personnel to run a pass-heavy offense. They just don’t. Macklin and Jackson are capable of making big plays but not capable of handling the workload of an offense that passes more than it runs. And with an uncertain Brian Westbrook, an unproven LeSean McCoy and a butterfingered Leonard Weaver, the Eagles ability to run a West Coast-style offense is severely limited. Their reliance on the big play has rewarded them with 11 wins this season but against good teams, 70-yard bombs are few and far between.

What will happen on Saturday night in Dallas is anyone’s guess. But insofar as it’s reasonable to talk about it before the game, Dallas has to be a prohibitive favorite. Their personnel, style of play and quite frankly, the results, have shown them to be a far better team. Only intangibles can save the Eagles now, and that’s no way to position yourself as you head into the playoffs.

The AP and BCS polls are out after a relatively light weekend in college football. While it wasn’t a Saturday marked by marquis matchups, there were three happenings over the past few days that are worthy of note.

The first is Jeremiah Masoli rallying Oregon from a 4th quarter deficit at a very tough Arizona team to eventually win the game in overtime. Not only was this a huge win for the 8th-ranked Ducks, it kept alive Oregon’s PAC-10 and Rose Bowl hopes. Donovan McNabb should watch tape of that game and see Masoli’s poise both on the field and on the sidelines. He put on a leadership clinic.

Secondly, Les Miles’ ineptitude in the LSU/Ole Miss game. After making about 4 clock management mistakes on their final possession, Miles and his coaching staff delivered the self-inflicted coup de grace by instructing quarterback Jordan Jefferson to spike the ball with 1 second on the clock. Needless to say the game ended, LSU lost and the SEC looked stupid.

And the greatest/worst occurrence surrounding this week’s college football is reports that Jimmy Clausen was punched in the face by an irate fan upon leaving a restaurant with his family on Saturday night. Of course, the Notre Dame quarterback is hardly the scapegoat in South Bend: he completed 67% of his passes against Connecticut for 329 yards and 2 TDs. Regardless, someone has to pay the price for this fan’s frustration, though if I were that guy I would have punched Les Miles.

Ok. Time for my weekly beef: in a sign that the AP voters simply cannot shake their old boys club bias, they have Penn State ranked ahead of Iowa. For my part, I think Penn State is probably playing better football than Iowa at this point but if fairness and demonstrated performance mean anything, this is an absolute farce.

How can a PSU team with the same 10-2 record as Iowa be ranked ahead of the Hawkeyes when Iowa beat Penn State at Happy Valley? How can Penn State who is behind Iowa in the Big Ten standings be ranked ahead of Iowa? How can Penn State, who lost to Big Ten leader Ohio State 24-7 at home be ranked ahead of an Iowa team who took Ohio State to overtime at the Horseshoe, be ranked ahead of Iowa?

The AP voters are like a bunch of second rate criminals who can’t get their story straight. They flub around, hoping nobody will notice that all they really do is rank their traditional favorites as high as they can and hope it’ll slide. Of course, their inability to do their jobs correctly may be part of the reason their poll isn’t used in determining a national champion.

The Eagles took it on the chin last night, losing a home game to the Dallas Cowboys by 4 points. Needless to say, millions in the Delaware Valley were stunned by even further evidence that the Eagles don’t win every game. News began surfacing somewhere during the 2nd quarter that the Cowboys were also trying to win the game, and that the heart and soul of the Eagles’ constitution may not have been enough to simply will a 6th win of the season.

The Eagles made some mistakes, as does every NFL team during every game. Andy Reid may have made a mistake by challenging a spot and when the challenge was not rewarded his decision cost his team the opportunity to stop the clock late in the fourth quarter. Three of the 5 offensive skill players relied upon to win games are in their first or second season (McCoy, Maclin and Jackson) and they made some mistakes. The offensive line is a work in progress. Donovan McNabb threw 2 picks (one of them clearly was not his fault) and had a 61.4 passer rating for the game. In all, this offense that people think is the 2007 Patriots based on their performance against the Giants is a question mark.

Defensively, the Eagles were mediocre. Their run defense only yielded 76 yards. While the Eagles secondary gave up 307 yards to Tony Romo, the front 7 pressured him well to the tune of 4 sacks. The conventional wisdom going into the game was that if the Eagles could put pressure on Romo, they would win the game. As it turned out, Romo handled the pressure pretty well and while he wasn’t the deciding factor in the game, he out-performed Donovan McNabb and added to his 4-game total of 9 TDs and only 1 INT.

If you’re looking for a simple decisive point in the game, it would have to be the 49-yard touchdown pass to Miles Austin. He ran though every member of the Eagles secondary (past and present) on his way to the winning touchdown. People can whine. They can cry. They can fire Andy Reid or Donovan McNabb or Anthony Gargano. But the bottom line is that anyone who watched last night’s game probably got the impression that it was played between two teams who were 5-2. There was little shown that suggested the Eagles had any decisive advantage, other than the religious certainty of the 50,000 players in the stands. So coming down hard on the Eagles today is understandable, but do you really think they lost the game or were they beaten by a comparable competitor?