Eagles Notebook: Reid says Eagles' penalty situation has gotten 'ridiculous'

Andy Reid doesn't throw around words like "ridiculous" every day. So when the coach, asked about being fourth in the league in penalty yardage assessed, reached deep into his bag of press conference responses, right past "I have to do a better job putting the players in position to make plays," and "everyone has a little piece of the pie," to "It's ridiculous" - well, you could tell Big Red was a mite peeved.

"That's something that you can control," Reid said. "I've told you before, there's one side of it where you've coached teams where you have to really motivate them to play hard, but this group here, there are times when you just have to back them off and tell them there's a time and a place for everything, and pull back on this situation here. They're offsides, guys trying to get to the quarterback, buzzing the line of scrimmage, or coming off of the football, special teams trying to knock somebody's head off, and you can't do that kind of stuff, and you have to be smarter there."

The IgglesBlog site posted an interesting analysis of the situation yesterday. The gist seems to be that the problem mostly comes down to special teams. The blog's data peg the Birds at 8.4 overall penalties per game, the 28th-best figure in the NFL, in which this year's average is 7.2 penalties per game. But the offense is averaging just 3.0, vs. a league average of 3.5, placing the Eagles ninth in the NFL. The defense is more culpable, 3.1 per game against an average of 2.6, ranking 24th overall. But the special teams figure is 2.3, nearly double the league average of 1.2, and a glittering 32nd in the 32-team NFL.

Why hasn't this gotten fixed? It certainly has been talked about. But the Eagles seem pretty happy with the way they're covering kicks and punts, and with so many young players, until it reached critical mass, there might have been a reluctance to temper aggressiveness, lest plays stop getting made.

"The hardest thing to do is to keep your aggressiveness and play smart in this game. We never want to take away the mind-set that we have . . . but we have to be disciplined," wideout and special teams veteran Jason Avant said. "It starts in practice. Hopefully, we can do that. I think we'll work it out, because we have guys who are smart enough to, and have enough restraint to do that.

"It's part of the game. You're going to make penalties, but not as many as we make."