Week 6: Philadelphia at San Francisco

Injury reports: you have to read them, if you write NFL previews for a website or enjoy educating yourself about the myriad baroquely terrible ways players get hurt while playing football. The Eagles went into Week 5 with ankle sprains and chest contusions and concussions and the truly terrifying sports hernia. After a wrenching home loss to the Redskins, the Eagles confront Week 6 with a similar spate of injuries, but have added to the mix two broken ribs – on their best player, RB Brian Westbrook – and the menacingly vague “abdomen,” which apparently afflicts DE Darren Howard in some way or other. Also, DE Victor Abiamiri is returning from a “dislocated wrist,” which is…how? How does that happen?

These are pro football players, and thus play through things like this whether they should or not, which means that WR Kevin Curtis (he of the hernia, the details of which are so scrotum-retractingly gnarly that they shouldn’t even be thought about) and RB Brian Westbrook (of the ankle injury and broken ribs) are not being officially ruled out for this one. They’re unlikely to play, though, which leaves the banged-up Eagles with the task of staving off a potentially season-busting third straight loss without two of their best offensive players. That their defense is comparatively complete is good news; that it didn’t help them keep Washington under 200 yards rushing in Week 5 isn’t so much good news.

The real good news for the Eagles – to the extent that people with broken ribs are capable of appreciating anything other than “here comes more morphine” as good news – is that they’ll be doing this trying-to-win thing not against another of their NFC East foes, but against the San Francisco 49ers. The Niners are as good a bet to win the NFC West as anyone in that benighted division, but that’s about as close to an uncritical use of the word “good” as we can muster in their direction.

Not being at a lot of 49ers games – although if Athlon is buying tickets, we definitely have the time – it’s hard to say exactly why this is. Their defense has generally underperformed and routinely given up a lot of points, despite the presence of a super-stacked secondary and linebacking corps. The offense has generally been able to put points on the board, but the defense’s inability to get opposing offenses off the field – as in Week 5, when the Patriots had the ball for nearly 40 minutes, as opposed to the 49ers 20:08 – has played directly into the maniacal hands of offensive coordinator Mike Martz.

The 49ers balanced attack early in the season was a bit of a vindication for Martz, who lost his mind with the Lions and spent most of last year’s second half babbling into his headset in a language of his own devising. By most doctors’ estimates, his madness caused Jon Kitna to suffer somewhere between 11 and 100 concussions. If the 49ers have the time to do it, Martz has shown himself able to make good use of the very excellent RB Frank Gore; if they’re trying to fit 30 minutes of offense into 20 minutes of come-from-behind desperation, though, it’s likely that Madman Martz will once again be in evidence. That means triple flea-flickers and a dozen touches for Gore, which is not good.

Assuming that the Eagles’ defense is better against the run than it looked in Week 5 – and that coordinator Jim Johnson will thus be able to go back to his usual spate of variegated blitzes – the Eagles should be fine, even with what promises to be a scaled-back offensive assault. The 49ers have yet to beat a team of any real merit in 2008, and while the Eagles’ merits are debatable even without the displaced abdominal walls and dislocated wrists and broken ribs, they’re sure closer than the Lions or Seahawks. If it looks like Martz is speaking “Martzu” into his headset in the fourth quarter, that’s because his madman alter ego, The Colonel, is back in command. And because the 49ers are, as we expect, letting this one slip away.

EAGLES BY 5