Eagles hiring Andy Reid 12 years ago was the right move

It's funny how these things come around. Twelve years ago, Jeff Lurie and Joe Banner interviewed four candidates for the Eagles' head coaching vacancy.

Three of them - Dom Capers, Jim Haslett, and Willie Shaw - were defensive coaches, as was Ray Rhodes, the man they sought to replace. The fourth (and really the only serious candidate) was Andy Reid, acolyte of the pass-first West Coast offense as created by Bill Walsh and interpreted by Mike Holmgren.

Reid was the only serious candidate because Lurie and Banner saw the trend. The NFL was already an offense-oriented league back then. The Packers and Broncos and Vikings were throwing the ball around and blowing fuses in scoreboards. The St. Louis Rams were just about to take it to another level with their Greatest Show on Turf. And it was only going to become more pronounced as the league tweaked the rules every year to favor crowd-pleasing offense.

"Well, I think there are some pretty good offenses out there," Reid said Monday. "I do. . . . I would tell you that offenses are pretty explosive in this league."

You think? Heck, even the best coach of the last decade, a onetime defensive coordinator named Bill Belichick, is winning with outrageous offensive production these days.

Hiring the relatively unknown Reid was a gutsy call at the time. It also proved to be a very good call, as six NFC East titles, five trips to the final four and one Super Bowl appearance attest. More specifically, Reid has been able to evolve along with the league in its drift toward offense first, offense second, and offense third.

Twelve years in, Reid will take his most prolific offense (and weakest defense) yet into the playoffs. And he will be matching wits with Capers, now the defensive coordinator of the Green Bay Packers. So a defensive coach, one he beat out for his current job, is the biggest threat to end this most improbable and dizzying season.

Funny how these things come around.

It's not really fair to assess Reid's performance this year until we see how it all turns out. We can say that he now bears little resemblance to the Reid of the first five years or so. That coach adhered to his preconceived plan with evangelical fervor. In the years since the Super Bowl loss to Belichick's Patriots, beginning with the Terrell Owens meltdown in 2005, Reid has been forced to improvise and adapt more often. Those newfound moves served him very well this year.

It all started, fittingly, with these very same Packers in the season opener. It was very nearly a debacle, as Reid was forced to regroup from a loss, injuries to his starting quarterback and middle linebacker, all the while defusing controversy about the handling of concussions to Kevin Kolb and Stewart Bradley.

Reid made the difficult and delicate decision to switch from Kolb to Michael Vick, then managed a potentially combustible situation when Kolb had to return to the starting lineup after Vick was hurt. After one of the most confounding losses of his tenure, that meltdown in Tennessee, Reid got his team to charge out of the bye week with three impressive victories.

With Vick playing the best football of his career, the Eagles forced their way into the mix of potential Super Bowl teams. Since then, Reid has been as publicly angry (Chicago) and as publicly giddy (in the post-miracle Meadowlands) as he's ever been after games. His team registered one of its most memorable wins, the comeback against the Giants, and most forgettable losses, that pratfall against the Vikings.

All of that becomes prologue now.

"This is the season," Vick said. "The season starts now."

That is the reality, and it is a byproduct of the standard Reid has set during his 12 seasons here. It is expected that his teams will win 10 or 11 or 12 games in the regular season. The real measure of a season is the postseason. For years, it was practically a given the Eagles would win at least one playoff game.

That changed last January in Dallas. That first-round loss was the first time one of Reid's teams got thoroughly dismantled in a playoff game, the first time the Eagles didn't belong on the field with an opponent.

This year's team has some of the same flaws that led to the blowout in Dallas: youth, inconsistent offensive line, porous defense. It is up to Reid to paper over those holes with an offensive scheme that gives Vick time and space to operate in the face of a sound, aggressive Green Bay defense.

A win would help make the argument that this was Reid's best all-around coaching job. A loss would make this just another year without a championship. It will come down to Reid or Capers once again. Funny how that happens.