Teams around the league: Green is not your color

There is a lot of resentment against the Philadelphia Eagles in the National Football League. The feeling has been brewing since the end of the lockout.

Those big moves that the Birds made leading up to the start of the season? The designation of “Dream Team,” though it was not a term the Eagles applied to themselves? It rubbed many the wrong way.  Some people around the league were busier paying attention to the media hype machine than their own teams, it seems.

Isn’t that a bit…strange? Immature? Unprofessional? Absolutely. But such is the National Football League. It’s worse than high school’s manufactured drama.

CBS Sports’ Mike Freeman shed light on the deep roots of the hatred on Monday, revealing the sheer joy many teams feel at the Eagles’ implosion thus far in the season. What he found was rather disturbing.

Says Freeman,

“In a league that is sometimes extremely petty, takes great offense to the smallest slight, and enjoys the failings of others, the Eagles are the perfect comfort food.”

Well damn.

A general manager of what is described as a “rival team,” paraphrased by Freeman,

“compared them to a prom king who kicked sand in the faces of fellow students, bragged about his skills with women and had perfect hair only to trip over the carpet and bloody his face while walking up to the podium to accept his crown.”

I assumed that these feelings must have come only from NFC East teams. But Freeman reports that the sentiments are felt by a “significant swath” of the NFL.

One scout said to him,

“It’s one thing to build a team, but it’s another to build a team and then rub the faces of everyone in football in what you’re doing.”

The Eagles finally stop being cheap and make some big moves and have the gall to be excited, and it’s viewed as deplorable arrogance by the rest of the league. What are their true feelings on Rex Ryan and all of his talk, I wonder?

For a bunch of individuals involved in one of the most brutal sports on the planet, the NFL certainly seems to be filled with a lot of thin-skinned, insecure individuals. Worry about yourselves and your own teams, not the moves of another doing exactly what every team should be doing–seeking to build an even stronger franchise in order to get a Super Bowl ring.

I suppose it’s human nature to delight in the difficulty (as, after 3 games, I’d hardly call it failure) of others. That fact doesn’t make the reality any less pathetic.

The Eagles have been cheap for decades. It’s about time they spent money. And the Eagles have tried to get as far away from the term “Dream Team” as soon as the words were uttered (damn you, Vince Young). So what exactly these people are upset about I have no idea.

But you know what? Just as they should be doing, I’m going to pay attention to my own team and move on. Until it’s time to make fun of the Giants, Cowboys or Redskins, that is.

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