McNabb supports Eagles using Wildcat, Vick

DONOVAN McNABB tried very hard yesterday to convince people that he is neither anti-Michael Vick nor anti-Wildcat.

While his message came across loud and clear to most of the reporters who attended his news conference at the NovaCare Complex, something obviously got lost in the translation by some of the national media outlets that aren't as fluent in McNabb-ese as those of us who have been covering him for a while.

"McNabb-Vick arrangement showing cracks?" the headline on ESPN's NFC East blog asked.

"McNabb calls Vick's role a 'gimmick,' " shouted the headline on Profootballtalk.com.

A lot of people made up their minds 2 1/2 weeks ago when the Eagles signed Vick that Philadelphia wasn't big enough for both him and McNabb. Didn't matter that McNabb said he encouraged the Eagles to sign Vick. Didn't matter that coach Andy Reid would never have considered bringing in Vick if McNabb hadn't been completely on board with the idea.

Then, when the TV cameras caught McNabb giving offensive coordinator Marty Mornhinweg the "cut" sign early in the second quarter of Thursday's preseason game against Jacksonville after he and Reid used the Wildcat six times on the Eagles' first four offensive series, well, the rush to judgment picked up even more speed.

But as McNabb tried his best to explain yesterday, he is all for the Eagles using the Wildcat. Thinks it will be a very effective weapon. He just had a problem with the excessive use of it early on against the Jaguars, before the offense had a chance to get into a rhythm.

"I always believe that before you can come up with gimmicks or come up with something else, you've got to get your base offense going," McNabb said. "I think in Game 3 of the preseason, that's something that teams take very seriously because that's really the last time that the [first team] get an opportunity to kick off the rust and get ready for the regular season.

"There were a lot of instances where it seemed like we were forcing a lot of different things just to say that we ran it, instead of just running our offense and running how things may go as far as during the year."