The Philadelphia Eagles front office should get an award. A major award. Like a Nobel Prize-type award. Any front office that can shut up the cantankerous Philadelphia fan base deserves to be canonized. Eagle fans were ready to foam at the mouth this past spring. Their team had just gone to its fifth conference championship game in head coach Andy Reid’s decade-long tenure and, for the fifth time, come away without a Super Bowl ring. For most fan bases, the sting of their team’s fourth conference championship defeat may have been ameliorated by the fact that the 9-6-1 Eagles had made an improbable run to even get as far as they did, and by the fact that the next door neighbor Phillies, three months before, had brought a World Series to the title-parched City of Brotherly Love. But these are Eagle fans we’re talking about. The most fervid, impatient and unreasonable bunch in sports.

Heading into this offseason, these fans were ready to bark. The personnel moves Philadelphia needed to make were obvious. Three beloved veterans were to become unrestricted free agents: safety Brian Dawkins, left tackle Tra Thomas and right tackle Jon Runyan. Running back Brian Westbrook would be 30 in September and battling a degenerative knee and bad ankle. The star wide receiver that had been eluding this offense since the breakup with Terrell Owens had just shown up in the form of electrifying rookie DeSean Jackson, yet, for some reason, Philly fans were adamant that their club still needed to trade for a veteran like Anquan Boldin or Braylon Edwards.

Say this about Eagle fans: honorary as they are, they’re not completely ignorant. All of their concerns were shared by Andy Reid, GM Tom Heckert and team president Joe Banner. We know they were because before the fans could scream about their team’s problems, these men fixed them.

It’s no accident that the offseason in which Philly had its biggest rebuilding necessities happened to come in the same year that the team had two first-round draft picks and some $40 million in salary cap space. This is the finest-managed organization in the NFC.

Just as fans started to carp about losing Thomas and Runyan, the Eagles shipped the No. 28 overall pick to Buffalo in exchange for gilded 27-year-old left tackle Jason Peters (whom the Eagles also made the highest-paid offensive lineman in league history). This came shortly after the signing of versatile ex-Bengal Stacey Andrews. Besides upgrading the offensive line himself, Andrews brings stability to the life of his younger brother, Shawn Andrews, Philly’s All-World power-blocker who missed virtually the entire ’08 season with a back injury and depression. Shawn Andrews now moves to his natural right tackle position (replacing Runyan), forming a remarkable bookend with Peters (who, by the way, was Andrews’s roommate at Arkansas). In short, the Eagles now might have the best O-line in football.

The loss of Dawkins hurt, but Philly coaches pointed out that soon-to-be 29-year-old strong safety Quintin Mikell is a burgeoning star and second-year free safety Quintin Demps has an uncommon blend of size and speed. Plus ex-Brown Sean Jones and former Patriot Ellis Hobbs give the secondary fantastic depth. Overall, the defensive backfield is better than it was last season.

As for the ball handlers…the decline of Brian Westbrook was mitigated with the second-round selection of Pittsburgh’s LeSean McCoy. McCoy is good enough to immediately lighten Westbrook’s load, and he’s versatile enough to one day replace him outright. The first-round pick the Eagles didn’t give up for Peters was spent on Missouri receiver Jeremy Maclin. This is a move that basically says, “If one DeSean Jackson isn’t enough for you, how about two DeSean Jacksons?”

The only person happier than the Eagle fans about Maclin’s arrival is Donovan McNabb. But the subject of McNabb is where the music stops. He and Reid are entering their 11th year together––the longest current quarterback/coach partnership in pro football. Yet the quarterback remains as enigmatic to his coach as he is to the rest of the world. Last season’s remarkable playoff run was portrayed as a comeback story about a star signalcaller inspired by his shocking Week 12 benching. But Reid’s decision to bench McNabb wasn’t a brilliant motivational ploy. Had Kevin Kolbe not stunk up the joint in the 36-7 loss at Baltimore, McNabb would have never stepped back on the field. The fact that McNabb played masterfully after the benching was mere serendipity––as if Reid had mistakenly said “hit me” on 17, then got dealt a Four of Clubs.

McNabb was angrier about the benching than people realized, and his relationship with Reid ostensibly suffered a blow. Wanting an extension to the final two years of his contract this past offseason, the Eagles were only willing to give him a raise (he’s now slated to make about $19 million). His future with the team is no less murky than it was last December. Of course, as we just learned, maybe that’s a good thing.

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