They have a wide receiver, Dameane Douglas, who tells the media relations staff that his hobbies include bungee-jumping - even though he has never done such a thing.
They crack jokes because a certain contingent of reporters is infatuated with the center, whose first name happens to be Bubba.
They have conversations like this on a drizzly day at training camp:
"Hey, man, can I get a ride?"
"Sure, no problem, I got you. . . . Wait a minute? Did I drive?"
The team's brass wanted to get better, so they spent a football field full of money in the off-season on offensive tackle Jon Runyan because, above all things, he is "nasty, nasty, nasty, nasty," in the words of former Tennessee Titans teammate Eddie George.
Hang around the Eagles, and you hear a 270-pound defensive end calling a 300-pound defensive tackle "fat boy."
You hear a locker room full of guys kidding with McNabb about how he is "the coach's boy."
You hear an offensive tackle, ever the protector, asking a wide receiver if he should take care of a locker-room heckler, who plays defense. "Want me to stuff him in the ice machine?" he asks.
The Eagles have guys with incredible physiques, but whenever a television camera comes their way, the first thing they say is, "Can I put my shirt on?"
The Eagles love it when the people who rarely get interviewed have their moment - oh, how they love it - and they heckle throughout. "Stop interviewing him and turn that light off!" defensive tackle Hollis Thomas screams.
Their Bubba, that media darling Bubba Miller, chats with fellow offensive lineman Doug Brzezinski about eating. They look at some prepared food in the locker room. "I'll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today," Brzezinski says, quoting Wimpy from the cartoon Popeye.
Then Brzezinski changes his mind.
"You want to go get some Brazilian food in North Philly?" he asks lineman John Welbourn.
They know all about media savvy, too. "Runyan better hurry up," Miller said one day. "The longer we stay here, a writer will start thinking, 'Hey, I can pull a story together on you.' "
Their coach, Andy Reid, is one of the youngest in the NFL, and his coordinators are two of the oldest.
Reid, a devout Mormon, has an enormous rebuilding task in the works, and sometimes a very un-Mormon-like word might slip out of his mouth.
Their second-round draft pick, wide receiver Todd Pinkston, is all of 170 pounds, and the Eagles staff says the word is not skinny but wiry.
Their defensive tackle, Brandon Whiting, quotes distance runner Steve Prefontaine, while linebacker Mike Caldwell loves six words from his special-teams coach, John Harbaugh - "Can't wait to see you play."
They are a wild bunch, all 53 of them.
Let's not even start on the locker room jokes.
"No, let's start," wide receiver Charles Johnson says.
They call McNabb "Bill Cosby."
"Look at that face," Johnson says. "That facial hair he has and that 'fro he got."
He laughs.
"If somebody says, 'Hey, hey, hey,' they're talking about him," Johnson says, referring to the Cosby-created character Fat Albert.
They have rules about the heckling, though. Stay away from the family. No wife jokes. No jokes about the kids.
"Those are the unwritten rules," Johnson says.
Everything else goes, though, especially jokes about clothes.
"When you dress up - aw, that's one of the biggest times people clown," Johnson says. "A person can have a nice outfit on, but if it's an unusual outfit, people have to say something. I remember I wore a red jacket, a bright red jacket, last year to Chicago. Man, I think they told me I was the usher or I was trying to land the plane or something like that. Oh, they hammered me. They hammered me. As a matter of fact, they mentioned that this preseason. Oh, my goodness. That was horrible.
"You might put yourself on something real nice, and it looks all tight, and you done paid some money for it. I don't care. If something don't look right, you're going to hear about it. If it's unusual, you will hear about it."
At that moment, tight end Luther Broughton came into the room.
"Hey, CJ, you going to tell him about you and that yellow shirt?" he asks, laughing.
"See what I mean?" Johnson says.
They know they have a way to go to be a dominant football team. They are serious about accomplishing that goal.
During the ride, however, they might as well have some fun.
Who are the Eagles? Well, they are a lot of things.
Except boring.
Jerry Brewer's e-mail address is jbrewer@phillynews.com
