When it is a truly lousy team, Reid will note that the players line up quite well for the national anthem, that they very rarely are late for their charter flights, and that there is very little discarded athletic tape left on the locker room floor after games.
In the week leading up to the game against the 0-4 (soon to be 0-5) Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Reid did everything but predict a late-season run to the Super Bowl.
"Again," he said, finally closing up after several minutes of prattling on about the Bucs' many attributes, they are "good football players - special teams, they've done a nice job there. We know what we have ahead of us."
Yes, that would be a 33-14 win against a Tampa Bay team that was undertalented and poorly coached.
You can't blame Reid. He does have empathy for the struggling masses of bad teams in the league and doesn't want his players to take any games lightly. He is apparently under the impression they have no access to the league standings and, more to the point, actually pay attention to what he says in his news conferences.
Nevertheless, Reid went out of his way this past week to extol the many virtues of today's opponent, the 1-4 Oakland Raiders, a team in such disarray its head coach might be arrested any day for allegedly breaking the jaw of an assistant coach.
"We understand their record, but we understand the reality of what we see on tape," Reid said. "A team that came out and played San Diego right to the end, came back the following week and beat Kansas City . . ."
And a team that lost three straight games after that by a combined score of 96-16.
". . . They have some young players that are very explosive on the offensive side, and they're working through some things, and the offensive line had a couple injuries. They're a potentially explosive football team."
And if you sit on a lump of coal long enough, you've got yourself a diamond.
Yes, the Raiders are indeed working through some things on the offensive side. They are particularly working through a set of performances by quarterback JaMarcus Russell that would be best described as "capable of improvement."
Russell has completed 42 percent of his passes this season, hasn't thrown a touchdown pass since Week 1, and is averaging 121 passing yards per game.
You would never know the Raiders having something called a Passing Game Coordinator on the coaching staff. His name is Ted Tollner, and he admits that young quarterbacks go through low patches early in their careers.
"Almost all of them have periods of it," Tollner told reporters. "Ours just happen to be lower than the low that any of us want."
At least Russell isn't about to be hauled in by the cops, which just might happen to head coach Tom Cable, who apparently did break the jaw of assistant Randy Hanson at the team's Napa Valley training camp hotel in August. That's what three other assistants who were in the room have reportedly told investigators in the case.
"From my blind side, Tom Cable threw me from my chair," Hanson said in a recent interview. "He was screaming, 'I'll [expletive] kill you! I'll kill you!' And I have no reason to believe he wouldn't have killed me if they hadn't pulled him away."
For a moment, let's reflect on the fact that while Reid is occasionally boring and has a penchant for not answering direct questions, he does not frequently smack around the coaching staff.
Part of the issue between Cable and Hanson is that Hanson was put in place by owner/wackjob Al Davis and was widely viewed as either a spy for the front office or just a dope.
Davis himself doesn't care what people think, and he routinely orders up things like the selection of Darrius Heyward-Bey with the seventh pick in the draft simply because Heyward-Bey had the fastest 40-yard dash time among all the available prospects. He had two hamstring pulls to go along with that clocking, too, but that didn't deter Davis.
Jeff Garcia got a good look at his surroundings there and requested his release after training camp.
"It got to a point where I felt like guys who walked through those doors were just there to collect a check and not really interested in putting everything they had within themselves onto the football field," Garcia said. "That was frustrating for me to see."
The Eagles get to test themselves against this fine organizational package today. It won't be a game to take lightly, at least for the first few series.
"We understand why we're going out to Oakland, and that's to play the Raiders," Reid said.
Good thing we straightened that out.
Contact columnist Bob Ford
at 215-854-5842 or bford@phillynews.com.
Read his blog at http://philly.com/postpatterns.
