None of that applies to Kolb's situation.
Kolb is nowhere near as mobile as McNabb. Kolb is about 20 pounds lighter, and nowhere near as solidly built.
Kolb's feature back, LeSean McCoy, did little last season to earn trust as a blitz buster.
The line is a huge question mark: Jason Peters coming off a subpar year, Todd Herremans' continued lower-leg issues, Jamaal Jackson's knee surgery, the trade of Stacy Andrews, replaced by Nick Cole, who fought a knee injury this preseason.
Sure, Kolb has weapons in speedy youths DeSean Jackson and Jeremy Maclin on the outside and Jason Avant and tight end Brent Celek on the inside. Defenses know that, too; expect Celek to be blanketed, as he was in the preseason.
Defenses also know that young QBs like to hit the hot, short routes, too quickly sometimes, and those sorts of easily anticipated passes often lead to six points the other way.
Then again, if the QB doesn't get rid of the ball, he gets hammered.
In preseason Game 3, Kolb sputtered against a sorry Kansas City blitz package.
Can he stand up to the real thing?
a McNabb hangover?
Probably not.
The biggest distraction in years, perhaps the biggest of the Reid era besides Year 2 of Terrell Owens, was the Brian Dawkins hangover last year.
Why?
None of Dawkins' replacements worked.
Injuries decimated the linebacker corps that was supposed to hide the dropoff in the secondary.
Dawkins, miffed and righteous, starred in Denver.
But Dawkins was always beloved and respected throughout the organization, from locker room to Lurie's box. He is, arguably, the most popular living Eagle, but was perfectly positioned to be so:
A defensive player, a hitter, a man who embraced accountability without condescension, who played hurt, who played with anger and intensity.
McNabb was many of those things, though less than Dawkins in some of the categories.
It is their difference of personality.
It will make all the difference now.
McNabb this year could take the Redskins to the Super Bowl and win it, but there never will be a general sense that he might have done the same for the Birds.
There should be that general sense - Dawkins himself considers trading McNabb incredible folly, perhaps Reid's worst move yet - but there will not be.
McNabb was respected. He was cheered. He was a man on whom the region pinned its hopes . . . but he never was loved.
He never was a part of Philadelphia, no matter how much Philadelphia became a part of him.
Dawkins? He's got little pieces of Veterans Stadium's artificial turf embedded in his forearms, microfractures in his spine from nailing Cowboys and Redskins with semilegal but ultrapopular hits. He owns McNabb's era.
It's unfair. It's true.
It's why McNabb's legacy is a decade from flowering, and why Dawkins' remains in constant bloom.
Send e-mail to hayesm@phillynews.com
