With Hobbs done for season, Eagles' Reid talks dangerous hits

ANDY REID sat behind the microphone at NovaCare yesterday and earnestly grappled with the issue of hits to the head, just as the Eagles' coach did 2 weeks earlier after the Kurt Coleman-Austin Collie collision in the Eagles-Colts game, just as he did last month, after DeSean Jackson ran face-first into Atlanta's Dunta Robinson.

Three Eagles home games, three trips onto the Lincoln Financial Field playing surface for the EMTs, the gurney and the back board, something that used to happen once every few years now seeming as commonplace as the coin flip.

This time, the guy carted off won't be playing again in 2010, or possibly ever. Eagles kick returner and corner Ellis Hobbs, strapped to the gurney after colliding head-to-head with the Giants' Dan Tollefson, will go on injured reserve, agent Kevin Omell said yesterday. The team said Hobbs suffered an unspecified neck disk injury. Hobbs underwent surgery for a neck-disk problem after a hit to the head during a kick return against Dallas last Nov. 8.

Asked what this might mean for Hobbs' career, Omell wrote in an e-mail: "Can't speak to that at the moment. Have to see what doctors say and how he feels in the coming months physically and mentally . . . Right now, he just feels fortunate to be walking."

The Eagles said only that Hobbs, 27, playing on a 1-year restricted free agent tender, has not yet been placed on IR. (There is no hurry, until they decide how they want to fill his roster vacancy. The team still has four healthy corners and might opt to add someone at another position.)

Reid spent much of his day-after news conference discussing what happened to Hobbs, a hit that broke no NFL rules, despite the leaguewide crackdown on blows to the head, and trying to reconcile all that with the 15-yard penalty assessed to cornerback Asante Samuel for a much less devastating hit to Giants wideout Derek Hagan.

"The more information we accumulate for the players to see and for the league to evaluate, we'll come to grips with something there that says, 'This is what you have to do.' Now, you have to make sure that you don't lower the target so much that you start taking everybody's knees out. I mean, that's not what the league wants, and that's not what the players want," Reid said. "And . . . Asante's gone low a couple times and had his bell rung [suffering a concussion Oct. 3 against the Redskins]. So you have to figure all that out."

Right now, there are obvious problems. Samuel was penalized even though, as Reid noted, he seemed to make contact with Hagan first with his shoulder, their heads banging because of the momentum generated by their high-speed collision.

"I thought he led with his shoulder - I mean literally came in sideways on [Hagan]. And their heads probably hit somewhere in there. I mean, they probably hit, but Asante, I know Asante, and Asante's not throwing his head in there and doing all of that, that's not his deal," Reid said. "He came in thinking 'shoulder,' and Asante's not a head-hunting type guy, that's not what he does."

Reid was asked what he would tell Samuel about avoiding such penalties in the future.

"Well, the angle, I'm not sure exactly what you do there," he said. "I mean, he came in and he led with a shoulder. I guess you could hit him down lower, and then you blow his knees out. I mean, I'm not sure there's a way around that. I thought he hit him in a good spot. He tried to keep his head out of the picture, led with his shoulder, literally came in sideways. So that's a hard thing to coach there. He's had it the other way where he's come in low and been knocked out. So it's a crazy deal.

"The thing I was proud about with Asante is that he could have easily come in with his head. He could have very easily done that. But he didn't."

Reid extolled Hobbs as "a tough, tough, tough guy, and he did work very hard to come back [from the 2009 injury]. So that was hard to watch yesterday when he was out there, just hoping for the best for him."

Reid was asked if he has ever seen a year with so many frightening outcomes of hits.

"Well, I don't know the answer to it. I haven't really studied that enough to know how many hits have happened during the season, here. But there have been some pretty rough ones," he said. "Again, Hobbs was a little bit of a bang-bang thing. I said that about DeSean's. I said that about Asante's last night. I'm not standing there going, 'These guys are flagrantly trying to knock each other out.' I mean, that's not what it is. They're trying to lead with the shoulder and the head gets involved. Now, the kickoff is a crazy deal. You're seeing a lot of injuries with that over the last few years."

Andy Reid said Asante Samuel suffered an MCL injury in Sunday's game but "I think he'll be OK" . . . Reid said Juqua Parker (hip) was "pretty tender today" . . . Asked about his run game's struggles against the Giants, Reid said: "We played the No. 1 defense in the National Football League last night. And when we had to run in that 4-minute period, we ran. And when we had to score, we scored, and we did it running the football. I'm not real concerned about that."

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