PHILADELPHIA - Marty Mornhinweg was half right, which is actually a pretty good ratio these days for an NFL coach.
The question: Do the Eagles' receivers have to adjust to Jeff Garcia's style after playing with Donovan McNabb?
"Not really," the offensive coordinator said in his most phlegmatic Andy Reid impersonation.
"They run the route, they catch the ball."
Well, they run the routes. That much is the same.
For the better part of the lesser part of this unimpressive Eagles season, the receivers ran the route and dropped the ball much too often. The offense tended to start slow, with dropped passes, unproductive run plays and miscues of every kind, before picking up speed in the second half.
On Monday night, in Garcia's first Eagles win, the offense started slowly.
There were dropped passes. There were unproductive runs. There were miscues of every kind, including one Garcia pass that landed in a roughly half-acre patch of vacant turf.
Oh, and things picked up speed in the second half.
Here's what makes this interesting: It is so hard to separate the quarterback from the overall offense at this level. The Eagles' traits during the last few years are easily confused with McNabb's traits.
If you assume McNabb is the slow starter - and there has been evidence of that - then you assume a different QB will bring different results.
It's rare you get a chance to replace one quality quarterback with another. Last year, Mike McMahon was clearly overmatched as McNabb's replacement, but there were also injuries along the offensive line and at running back, and then there was the disappearance from the scene of the star wide receiver.
So you learned nothing about the Eagles' offense, or about McNabb's role in it, from watching the badly damaged version McMahon was running.
This year is different, because Garcia is a solid, experienced NFL quarterback with a pedigree, and because the rest of the offense is intact. So this is a little more like replacing spark plugs until you figure out which is the bad one.
It wasn't McNabb.
He isn't perfect, and he still bears responsibility for perhaps the season's most costly loss. Those two interception returns for touchdowns by Tampa Bay's Ronde Barber were his mistakes.
But we're looking at the overall trend here, the slow starts and the drowsiness that seems to come over this offense at times.
The first quarter against Carolina on Monday looked a lot like the first quarter of any number of McNabb's starts. L.
J. Smith dropped the first pass of the game. Donte Stallworth dropped the second.
In between, Brian Westbrook ran for 2 yards. The Eagles punted the ball away on all three first-quarter possessions. Mistakes - drops, penalties, miscommunications - outnumbered first downs.
"I'd love to be able to start fast," Garcia said. "Unfortunately, we struggled a little bit in the first quarter the other night before we finally got some plays downfield. I've been in situations, especially years in San Francisco, where often times the opening drive of games, we were going down and getting touchdowns.
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Aside from 2004, the McNabb-to-Owens Super Bowl season, the Eagles have not tended to be fast starters. The reason may be in the very nature of Reid's offense.
There are offensive systems based on dictating the action to the other team.
One of the great compliments is to say an offense can't be stopped even when the defense knows exactly what's coming: Washington's old counter-trey running game or Peyton Manning to Marvin Harrison, for example.
The Eagles' offense doesn't generally work that way. It relies more on taking advantage of vulnerabilities in the opposing defense.
Sometimes that means poking around, trying to figure out where those vulnerabilities are, or recognizing the defensive strategy. In short, bad starts have more to do with the offensive game plan and the script for the first couple of drives than with the quarterback.
That doesn't necessarily explain the drops or the false-start penalties, but there is some connection between a flawed game plan and disjointed performances by the players.
If what you see on the field differs from what you spent all week preparing for, it can take time to regroup.
When they have been successful, Reid's teams have tended to get better as the game wears on and as the season wears on. When they have driven fans nuts, it's because of choppy starts and early uncertainty.
The exception was 2004, when McNabb had more offensive weapons than ever and the overall confidence level was high. That season suggested the quarterback wasn't the reason for the slow starts and uneven play. This season seems to confirm that.
Changing the quarterback didn't change the Eagles' tendency to make things as hard on themselves as possible. The team will have a chance as long as Garcia can find ways to overcome all that. Just like McNabb.
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