Lyric Association: MNF Edition

Like one of the other great columnists/bloggers of this millenium, Bill Simmons, I am going to associate a certain lyric or movie line/scene with certain events that happen during the week. Most of the time, these will be sports-related, but hey, I'm flexible and enjoy other things outside of sports (okay, playing college football video games doesn't count, but I'll work on having a life later). The inaugural lyric pertains to the tough victory the Philadelphia Eagles earned an hour or two ago:

You can hate me now.. but I won't stop now..
Cause I can't stop now.. you can hate me now..
But I won't stop now.. cause I can't stop now..
--Nas

This one goes out to Jeff Garcia. In Philadelphia, we enjoy to boo. We boo our players, refs, Santa Claus, Michael Irvin, Santa Claus, and anything else that we damn well please when we are frustrated. Hell, we would probably boo the little kids that play hockey in between periods of the Flyers games if they weren't so cute and hilarious on the ice. Right now, though, I have to give kudos to our back-up quaterback. He has stepped into an almost impossible situation of filling the shoes of a beloved icon in the City of Brotherly Love. And with Super Bowl aspirations at the beginning of the season already seemingly dashed, the Eagles needed Jeff Garcia to control the offense.

And he has these past two games. Last week, the run defense showed up in it's swiss cheese package for the fourth straight game and essentially handed the game over to Joseph Addai who scored all the touchdowns that the Colts required to win. Garcia was impressive, though, completing an absurd 82 % of his passes and two TDs.

Tonight, in his home debut as a starter, he had a rocky start, but my what a finish. While the completion percentage dropped (most of which is attributed to dropped passes and a number of errant throws), Garcia gets the game-ball. He tossed 3 TDs to no interceptions in addition to over 300 yards passing. The criticism of his inability to throw the deep ball was answered with two plays: an astounding one-handed catch by Donte Stallworth and a game-tying strike to Reggie Brown.

The lyric, though, pertains most to the boos. Garcia took two nasty licks in succesion, one of which drew a roughing the passer penalty and the other where he was flattened by Kris Jenkins. The latter most likely knocked the wind out of him, but he was on the ground for quite some time and there were cheers because A.J. Feely had a chance to enter the game. Garcia, though, eventually waved him off.

And then the boos began. Philadelphia wants Feely in because of his record a few years ago when McNabb broke his ankle. Unwavered by this display of what can only be termed as"tough love" (or maybe "irrational anger to win with no championships for 23 years") Garcia ignored the boos and followed the display of tough love with 30 yard pass to a wide-open Stallworth who leapt into the endzone to tie the game at 14 points a piece.

This win clearly marks the return of the stout mean green machine defense (at least for this game anyways) that played hard and forced turnovers at critical moments in the game (i.e. Brian Dawkins and Lito Sheppard). But this game belongs to Garcia because no matter how much booing the fans have thrown his way, he stepped up tonight and kept the Eagles in the game tonight. And hopefully, he won't stop now because with the NFC once again in a ridiculously mediocre playoff race, the Eagles still have a shot at securing a wild card spot.