Reid upbeat; Birds' finish is hard to swallow

Andy Reid says he is hungry for prime rib and a Super Bowl championship.

Evidently, he likes them both rare.

There was something unsettling about Reid's 12th day-after-the-season-ended news conference Monday. Although he said he was "not satisfied" with the season, everything else he said suggested that he was actually pretty pleased.

"I think there are a lot of positives to look at here," Reid said. "Very few teams can kind of retool the way that we retooled and still compete, put yourself in a position to compete for a championship, and we were able to do that."

Combined with Michael Vick's repeated claim, "We had a great season," after Sunday's wild-card loss to the Packers, you get the sense the Eagles are living in a bubble.

It was not a great season. It was a pretty good season. After the big break from Donovan McNabb, nothing was accomplished that McNabb didn't do as well or better in his 11 seasons with the Eagles. Indeed, this would have been a below-average season on McNabb's watch. It wasn't even quite as good as the one that got him fired last year.

Expectations were tamped down because the plan was for Kevin Kolb to learn on the job. Once Reid went with Vick, a 30-year-old Pro Bowler, expectations changed accordingly.

The point isn't that Reid has to go. He isn't going anywhere. He remains one of the better coaches in the NFL, a man who gives this team a legitimate chance to be in the postseason tournament every year. That is a fair and accurate assessment, but so is this: Reid has not won a Super Bowl and it is reasonable to wonder whether his best opportunities are behind him.

This year's will be the 45th Super Bowl. The Eagles have never won one. Reid has been their head coach for 26.67 percent of those seasons.

Reid's tenure can be divided into two parts. The first six years, there was a clear progression from the 3-13 team he inherited to the 13-3 team that went to the Super Bowl after the 2004 season. There were hiccups - those two home NFC championship losses cost the Eagles two more cracks at the Lombardi Trophy - but overall, Reid followed through splendidly on his blueprint for building a winning program.

Reid's record in his first six seasons: 64-32 in the regular season, 7-5 in the playoffs.

The second half of Reid's tenure (so far) has not been as impressive. That sense of steady climbing toward the top disappeared with the 6-10, Terrell Owens-tainted 2005 season. There were two division titles, both won with relatively modest 10-6 records. There was that unexpected run to another NFC title game in 2008, but that looks more and more like an aberration.

Reid's record in his second six seasons: 54-41-1 in the regular season, 3-4 in the playoffs.

For a decade, the Eagles won at least one game every time they reached the playoffs. The last two years, they were fairly easy outs in the first round.

That is not progress. After a six-year run worthy of the Hall of Fame, Reid has overseen a six-year stretch that would get most coaches fired. He is still living off the considerable equity he built in that first flush of success.

That's fine, as long as the team begins trending back toward a Super Bowl. Reid's message Monday was that it is on the way.

"We feel comfortable going forward that we have some good young football players on this team, some good veteran players and a good mix right there to go compete for a championship," Reid said.

That's where we have to disagree. The Eagles did have a lot of young players on the field Sunday. They all gained valuable experience. But that doesn't guarantee they will develop into great, or even very good, players. On defense, especially, the Eagles' record of drafting and developing young stars isn't very good.

This defense has been in rebuilding mode for at least three years. It is nowhere near championship caliber.

Version 2.0 of the offense is much further along, but already there are troubling patterns. Vick's performance level dropped as defenses figured him out and his body wore down from all the punishment. DeSean Jackson is either scorching hot or utterly ineffective. Reid's pass-crazed approach still puts too much pressure on all the seams: the QB, the offensive line, a defense that wears down with the extra burden.

Reid is certainly capable of fixing these problems. But it will help if he follows his own advice to the players: "I expect them to go back and be real with themselves and be critical of themselves."

It would be a big mistake to pretend this team overachieved. It didn't. All it did was crash to earth in the postseason.

Reid can order up a nice prime rib. As for that Super Bowl, everyone gets to stay hungry for another year.