Bradley Out!

I heard it first from the Comcast cable installation guy (admittedly not the most credible source) and I didn't want to believe it, but in my heart I knew it was true. When he finally got the cable hooked up and then rehooked up (he switched the box before realizing the remote wasn't working), he turned to ESPN2 and while our fat friend Michael Golic jabbered about what Roger Goodell was going to do with Plaxico Burress while he awaits trial, I saw a blurb rolling across the bottom of the screen: "ESPN Radio 950 Philadelphia is reporting that Eagles LB Stewart Bradley suffers season-ending ACL tear" (or something like that). My heart sank. As you saw from my last post, I really believed that Bradley was ready to make the leap to pro-bowl caliber. Instead we're left with a big hole in the middle, perhaps the position on the defense where we haev the least NFL-tested depth. The obvious candidate to replace Bradley is Gaither, whose body-type screams weakside (235 lbs compared to Bradley's 255), even if Gaither seems to have a better grasp of the Mike position than the Will. Gaither will not be as stout against the runs up the middle, so we better hope that Bunkley and Patterson are as impressive this year as last year, and he tends to overplay at times against outside runs and the short passing game. That said, I do think Gaither has the tendency to be a playmaker, if also to make some mistakes. He has a nose for the football, and is a damn good hitter for his size (but is still small for the MIKE), but he won't be what Bradley could have.

The other possible backup here is Joe Mays, a second-year player who was a dynamo in the preseason last year but rarely made it onto the field thereafter. The kid looked like a bowling bowl bouncing around last year carrying ten pounds more than Gaither while being two inches shorter. I doubt though that he can grasp the intricacies of Johnson's defense enough to take over the Mike position, which is traditionally the signal-caller spot--something else significant we lose with Bradley going down.

Let's hope Gaither or Mays can be disciplined and play bigger than their size, or this Bradley loss will be a serious problem for a defense that I hoped would again be in the top 5 in the league. I hope he'll be back at full speed for 2010.