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I hopped into the Way-Back Machine and found a couple of articles, one from pre-Rush comments and one shortly after. The second gives some offensive statistics (flipping my cigar and raising my eyebrows up and down) Offensive? Offensive does quite begin to describe this offense... ahem, anyhow:

Posted on Mon, Sep. 15, 2003

McNabb in daze; Reid in denial
By Bill Lyon
Inquirer Columnist

First rule of the box office: If you can't win, at least entertain. The Eagles, wounded, wretched and woebegone, can't do either. They can't, in fact, get out of their own way.

It's bad enough that they aren't competitive, but worse, they're boring. You should be asking for refunds. You can sit down when they're playing and know you'll be there for the duration because they sure won't be doing anything to make you stand up. Nor do they give you any reason to think that things will be improving any time soon. Sunrise seems years away.

The good ship USS Reid is foundering in heavy seas and taking on water fast, and Cap'n Andy needs all hands on deck to bail. He is facing the greatest crisis since he took the job. He will find very little sympathy for his plight. When you play like this, you have only each other for comfort.

His quarterback, the cornerstone of the franchise, is in full, dazed retreat. Donovan McNabb was supposed to blossom this season; instead he has withered. The crowd has called for his benching.

Frankly, desperate as that sounds, it didn't strike you as such a bad idea.

"There's nothing wrong with Donovan," Reid insisted.

Well, clearly there is something wrong with him, and to suggest otherwise is an insult to everyone, an act of abject denial. His passes lack conviction as well as accuracy. He turns the ball over far too often. He is effective only when he runs, and he is reluctant to do that. His play is that of a man who finds himself riding a tiger and wanting desperately to get off but not sure how to dismount.

Only two weeks in, and this season has deteriorated from seeking the Super Bowl to simple survival.

With yesterday's dismal loss to New England, the Birds have begun their campaign 0 and 2. Worse, that's 0 and 2 at home. Twice now, in a span of six days, they have fouled their handsome new nest. With one game left in the season's first month, at Buffalo against a team that has scored 69 points its first two games, the Eagles are looking at the dreary and very real possibility of being ohhh-for-September.

They will have two weeks to marinate in the bile of this one, what with the bye week now at hand. Originally, this seemed like wretched timing, getting the pit stop with the season barely begun.

But Reid will need every minute of it now. If the team's confidence isn't completely shot, it is certainly shaken. Before, whenever the Birds had lost, Reid kept them believing and rebounding - since the first month of the 2000 season, never has a regular-season loss been followed by another loss.

Until now.

They will, he said, get this turned around. He neglected to say how.

On the defensive side of the ball, the Birds have acceptable excuses. In a word: Injuries. They are sorely depleted, especially in the secondary, and the Patriots cruelly and methodically exploited that vulnerability, throwing 44 passes, three for touchdowns.

The Birds' young cornerback, Lito Sheppard, forced to fill in for Bobby Taylor, was mercilessly and repeatedly picked on by the Patriots. In the NFL, the carnivores go after the young and the helpless.

The Eagles' offense has no such alibi. It is healthy and whole. But Reid's play-calling continues to infuriate and frustrate.

Even more damaging and alarming is the obvious regression of McNabb.

This season, he has seemed to decline. As badly as he played in the season opener, he was even worse yesterday. It may be of some consolation that he even made it through the game. With only 2 minutes, 40 seconds to play, McNabb was blindsided by linebacker Matt Chatham, a 250-pound helmet-tipped missile who proceeded to pile-drive the quarterback into the turf, shoulder first.

McNabb didn't move for long and anxious seconds. Your first thought was separated shoulder or broken collarbone. Neither, luckily for the Birds.

The question begged for an answer: With the Eagles down by 21 points with less than three minutes to play, why was McNabb still in the game?

"Well, we did get him out of there," Reid said.

Yes, but with all of 59 whole seconds to play. By then, McNabb had thrown 28 incompletions, had been sacked seven times, had suffered two lost fumbles and two interceptions, and looked thoroughly befuddled.

And yet the coach insisted that nothing was wrong with the quarterback.

Until that is acknowledged, and addressed, the Birds won't be pulling out of this death dive.

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Contact columnist Bill Lyon at 215-854-5508 or blyon@phillynews.com.

And from shortly after:

Rush Limbaugh Was Right
Donovan McNabb isn't a great quarterback, and the media do overrate him because he is black.
By Allen Barra
Slate
Posted Thursday, Oct. 2, 2003, at 3:33 PM PT

In his notorious ESPN comments last Sunday night, Rush Limbaugh said he never thought the Philadelphia Eagles' Donovan McNabb was "that good of a quarterback."

If Limbaugh were a more astute analyst, he would have been even harsher and said, "Donovan McNabb is barely a mediocre quarterback." But other than that, Limbaugh pretty much spoke the truth. Limbaugh lost his job for saying in public what many football fans and analysts have been saying privately for the past couple of seasons.

Let's review: McNabb, he said, is "overrated ... what we have here is a little social concern in the NFL. The media has been very desirous that a black quarterback can do well—black coaches and black quarterbacks doing well."

In his notorious ESPN comments last Sunday night, Rush Limbaugh said he never thought the Philadelphia Eagles' Donovan McNabb was "that good of a quarterback."

"There's a little hope invested in McNabb, and he got a lot of credit for the performance of his team that he didn't deserve. The defense carried this team."

Let's take the football stuff first. For the past four seasons, the Philadelphia Eagles have had one of the best defenses in the National Football League and have failed to make it to the Super Bowl primarily because of an ineffective offense—an offense run by Donovan McNabb. McNabb was a great college quarterback, in my estimation one of the best of the '90s while at Syracuse. (For the record, I helped persuade ESPN Magazine, then called ESPN Total Sports, to put him on the cover of the 1998 college-football preview issue.) He is one of the most talented athletes in the NFL, but that talent has not translated into greatness as a pro quarterback.

McNabb has started for the Eagles since the 2000 season. In that time, the Eagles offense has never ranked higher than 10th in the league in yards gained. In fact, their 10th-place rank in 2002 was easily their best; in their two previous seasons, they were 17th in a 32-team league. They rank 31st so far in 2003.

In contrast, the Eagles defense in those four seasons has never ranked lower than 10th in yards allowed. In 2001, they were seventh; in 2002 they were fourth; this year they're fifth. It shouldn't take a football Einstein to see that the Eagles' strength over the past few seasons has been on defense, and Limbaugh is no football Einstein, which is probably why he spotted it.

The news that the Eagles defense has "carried" them over this period should be neither surprising nor controversial to anyone with access to simple NFL statistics—or for that matter, with access to a television. Yet, McNabb has received an overwhelming share of media attention and thus the credit. Now why is this?

Let's look at a quarterback with similar numbers who also plays for a team with a great defense. I don't know anyone who would call Brad Johnson one of the best quarterbacks in pro football—which is how McNabb is often referred to. In fact, I don't know anyone who would call Brad Johnson, on the evidence of his 10-year NFL career, much more than mediocre. Yet, Johnson's NFL career passer rating, as of last Sunday, is 7.3 points higher than McNabb's (84.8 to 77.5), he has completed his passes at a higher rate (61.8 percent to 56.4 percent), and has averaged significantly more yards per pass (6.84 to 5.91). McNabb excels in just one area, running, where he has gained 2,040 yards and scored 14 touchdowns to Johnson's 467 and seven. But McNabb has also been sacked more frequently than Johnson—more than once, on average, per game, which negates much of the rushing advantage.

In other words, in just about every way, Brad Johnson has been a more effective quarterback than McNabb and over a longer period.

And even if you say the stats don't matter and that a quarterback's job is to win games, Johnson comes out ahead. Johnson has something McNabb doesn't, a Super Bowl ring, which he went on to win after his Bucs trounced McNabb's Eagles in last year's NFC championship game by a score of 27-10. The Bucs and Eagles were regarded by everyone as having the two best defenses in the NFL last year. When they played in the championship game, the difference was that the Bucs defense completely bottled up McNabb while the Eagles defense couldn't stop Johnson.

In terms of performance, many NFL quarterbacks should be ranked ahead of McNabb. But McNabb has represented something special to all of us since he started his first game in the NFL, and we all know what that is.

Limbaugh is being excoriated for making race an issue in the NFL. This is hypocrisy. I don't know of a football writer who didn't regard the dearth of black NFL quarterbacks as one of the most important issues in the late '80s and early '90s. (The topic really caught fire after 1988, when Doug Williams of the Washington Redskins became the first black quarterback to win a Super Bowl.)

So far, no black quarterback has been able to dominate a league in which the majority of the players are black. To pretend that many of us didn't want McNabb to be the best quarterback in the NFL because he's black is absurd. To say that we shouldn't root for a quarterback to win because he's black is every bit as nonsensical as to say that we shouldn't have rooted for Jackie Robinson to succeed because he was black. (Please, I don't need to be reminded that McNabb's situation is not so difficult or important as Robinson's—I'm talking about a principle.)

Consequently, it is equally absurd to say that the sports media haven't overrated Donovan McNabb because he's black. I'm sorry to have to say it; he is the quarterback for a team I root for. Instead of calling him overrated, I wish I could be admiring his Super Bowl rings. But the truth is that I and a great many other sportswriters have chosen for the past few years to see McNabb as a better player than he has been because we want him to be.

Rush Limbaugh didn't say Donovan McNabb was a bad quarterback because he is black. He said that the media have overrated McNabb because he is black, and Limbaugh is right. He didn't say anything that he shouldn't have said, and in fact he said things that other commentators should have been saying for some time now. I should have said them myself. I mean, if they didn't hire Rush Limbaugh to say things like this, what did they hire him for? To talk about the prevent defense?