As offensive coordinator, Marty Mornhinweg closely follows the progress of every offensive player on the Eagles roster. He provided a status update on several intriguing players during his morning press conference.
On Michael Vick: "I think he was in decent shape coming in, as far as in general. But, football shape: moving, cutting, lateral movement, throwing the football, moving while he's throwing the football. I think he's in pretty good shape right now, football shape. But we'll see, we're still taking it day-to-day."
"How does Michael look in the offense? At quarterback? He looks pretty good. It was a fairly seamless transition, even though he hadn't played for two years, because of the terminology, it's very similar. Now, many of the details are different and details are where you win football games, so that's the important part there. The terminology is coming very easily to him."
On LeSean McCoy's blocking: "It's coming. He's made a dramatic jump really initially and [RBs Coach] Ted [Williams] does a fine job with our running backs in the protection part of it. Both the mental part of it and the technique part of it. That technique is vital for the running backs. Typically, they're going against a man that is much bigger and very strong in many cases, so that technique just has to be perfect."
On Jeremy Maclin: "He's coming on strong. He's a very sharp, very bright guy. He's a natural type player so things come pretty quickly to him. In fact, I just discussed it right after practice with him and I do think he's feeling pretty comfortable right now with the things that we've asked him to do."
On whether Maclin has caught up from the time he missed: "I don't think you ever quite catch up because those reps that you lose you cannot gain them back. [WRs coach] David Culley has taken a systematic approach to this thing and has since the day that he got in and David does a heck of a job with our receivers. It's been every practice, including the walkthrough the day before the game, we're accomplishing at least one thing everyday with him. So, that's worked well up to date."
On Brandon Gibson: "I think Brandon Gibson, really all our receivers, Brandon Gibson for sure is in a heated battle right now to make this football team. He is right in the competition. He's been impressive in many things. Here was the thing with the last ballgame is that when you grade the players, every one of them did some very good things and they graded out almost across the boards. They played really well except for one, two, or three plays. But you can't have that. You can't have that across the boards and so we've got to tighten that thing up. We've got to get those mistakes down to a minimum."
-- Posted by Bo Wulf, 3:38 p.m., August 23
