How Soft is Too Soft?
August 18, 2025
Now I know it’s just me. I’m sure now that no one cares anymore when the people in charge of our sports teams choose the path of least danger at the expense of fan interest and common sense.
All I can do is report what happened on Saturday afternoon when I left my spot on the Sea Isle beach and headed in to watch my new favorite Eagle, Tanner McKee, get some valuable experience in an otherwise blah preseason game.
Of course, you know by now that Tanner McKee got none of that experience because he didn’t play. No, he’s not hurt. Coach Nick Sirianni didn’t want to risk injury to his backup quarterback.
Let me repeat that.
The coach benched his backup quarterback.
I got so angry, I texted the most emotional Eagles fan I know, the legendary Arson Arnie, to sound off. I expected Arnie to share my frustration. He did not. He said the starting team was already set, so it was no big deal.
No big deal? What about the fans who were broiling in the August heat, having paid $20 or $50 or $100 to watch a scintillating battle for No. 3 quarterback between Dorian Thompson-Robinson and Kyle McCord?
But this is a debate I lost many times in my last years at WIP, and it is a debate I will continue to lose every time until I draw my final breath. For the most part, fans accept the new way of doing things, this supposed path of least danger.
They find better ways to spend their time.
Clearly, I don’t.
A decade ago, most NFL teams used the preseason to work with their starters for at least half the running time of four exhibition games. Now, putting even just the backups out there is too much to ask.
Could someone tell me why they’re scheduling these games? Wouldn’t it be smarter to roll in bubble wrap any player projected for the regular-season roster and count the days until the real games start? I mean, wasn’t Sirianni worried that some of his important players would get heat stroke just by standing on the sideline?
I went back to the beach Saturday afternoon grumbling like my father did many years ago about “these players today. . . .” Nobody wanted to hear it.
It’s official now. I’m a dinosaur.
Sirianni is not the only person in authority who has redefined the term wuss. Rob Thomson is a baseball lifer who has drunk the analytics Kool-Aid beyond reason, at least to me. His decision-making in the dugout these days consists of pitch counts, exit velocities, launch angles and not much else.
On the same day that Sirianni benched his backup QB, Thomson learned that he was losing Zack Wheeler, indefinitely with a blood clot in his ace’s throwing arm. This is the same Zack Wheeler who has been theoretically safeguarded from injury by his manager’s religious commitment to keeping the pitch count under 100.
All I could think was, did this unwelcome news raise any questions in Thomson’s mind about the completely arbitrary 100-pitch limit the manager uses? Or did he again lament the one time last month when he allowed Wheeler to complete a game with 108 pitches?
I think we all know the answer to that question, even though the clot medically had nothing to do with any of this pitch-count insanity. Remember (see last week’s blog), Thomson was already second-guessing himself about the complete game before the bad news.
And then there are the Sixers, who have been practicing consumer fraud for a decade now over the physical condition of their main attraction, Joel Embiid. How else to explain how our money-obsessed basketball team has accepted full price for tickets, only to sit the eccentric center for no reason beyond “load management.”
Have the Sixers kept Embiid healthy by managing his load this way? Well, you decide. So far, he has missed close to half the games in his 11-year NBA career. And yet, if anything, the Sixers are more reluctant than ever to use their biggest weapon in games before the playoffs.
Last week, this ridiculous situation reached a new level of absurdity when coach Nick Nurse was asked for an update on Embiid’s surgically repaired left knee, which was repaired with meniscus surgery in early April.
Will Embiid be ready for training camp next month?
“I’m not sure,” Nurse said. “Again, the news is positive. I know he’s working very, very hard, and I think things look good. Whether he’s ready for training camp or now, I think maybe there’s a lot more decisions than that to make before we get there.”
Huh? The typical recovery time for meniscus surgery is four to six weeks. (For example, Eagles guard Landon Dickerson had it last week, and is still projected to be ready for the opening game less than four weeks later.)
By the start of training camp on Oct. 1, Embiid will have had the operation more than five months ago, and the Sixers have no idea whether he will be ready? Really?
A $55-million salary doesn’t pay for very much these days, does it?
Through all of this, the next a column I read or tirade I hear on sports radio about the soft new world of Philadelphia sports will be the first. Everybody just accepts the thoroughly unscientific new rules on protecting players.
When Wheeler was pulled from a playoff game against the Mets last year after seven one-hit innings with a 1-0 lead, not a dissenting word was heard or written anywhere.
When McKee was benched last weekend, though logic suggests that the young quarterback would benefit from preseason experience, again, crickets.
And when Nurse bobbed and weaved about Embiid, no one bothered to do the math and ask how – after five months for a procedure whose recovery time is six weeks, max – there was any question about the player’s readiness for training camp.
The majority rules here, I guess. I’m wrong to keep bringing up how much more durable, and how much less coddled, players were 10, 20 or 30 years ago. To most people, that’s ancient history.
Different world, different rules.
If you got to the end of this post, at least you learned something.
I’ll bet you never knew that dinosaurs could type.