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Coach Machiakelly remakes culture in Philadelphia
Chip Kelly trades Nick Foles
Rick Soisson
It was about the time that the Eagles refused to re-sign wide receiver Jeremy Maclin (following, of course, the trade of LeSean McCoy, a former rushing champion, to Buffalo for a kid linebacker with bad knees) that somebody (probably on Twitter) noticed that theater attendance, film ticket sales, and even Starbucks sales began to plummet in Philadelphia. Gallup provided documentation later that Philadelphians were simply staying at home to wring their hands in uncertainty about the team’s historically disappointing, but beloved, professional football team, the Eagles.
Few were ready for the gyrations of mid-March, however. First, on March 10th, Coach Nick Machiakelly traded his nominal starting quarterback, Nick Foles, to St. Louis for another player with bad knees, a quarterback who had played only seven games in the previous two seasons. Rumors had the Rams and Eagles also exchanging their first-round 2015 draft picks, with the Eagles moving up from number 20 to number 10. The draft was mere weeks away.
Not surprisingly, that 20 for 10 thing wasn’t quite true. Philadelphia, however, did acquire gimpy QB Sam Bradford. Speculation was that the whole matter was a smoke screen, that Bradford would never wear Eagles colors, that he only would be a chip in the poker game being played for former Oregon quarterback Marcus Mariota, considered by some to be a budding combination of Michael Jordan, Abraham Lincoln, and Joe Montana (but with more “mad skilz”).
On March 11th, sales at the Starbucks at 42nd and Woodland — near a college campus — fell to four grande regular coffees and a stale croissant.
Machiakelly’s move March 16th was even more unexpected. Converting Sam Bradford into Euros, Philadelphia’s head coach paid cash for three Premiere League stars whose names nobody recalls, then traded all three to the Oakland Raiders for an unprecedented eight draft picks covering three years. (Oakland decided they liked all three European players because “they’re our kind of people; they have awesome tats.”)
Philadelphia held its breath.
A historic beer bottle fight
On March 17th, the St. Paddy’s Day riot occurred, pitting drunken Machiakelly supporters against detractors, in seven separate locations, in what Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey later called “the worst beer bottle fight in history.”
On March 18th and 19th, none of the 11 movie theaters in the city showing Focus sold a single ticket to the film. Margot Robbie reportedly checked into Betty Ford, but this was surely Philly-centric, Twitter nonsense.
Eventually, NFL Draft Day One arrived. No fewer than 30 coffee shops in Philadelphia had closed between March 1 and April 30; state store sales, not surprisingly, had skyrocketed. However, after adding Cole Hamels’s Center City apartment to a package involving three Eagles cheerleaders, an undisclosed amount of cash, a 2 percent piece of the Eagles (under league review), and Riley Cooper, Coach Machiakelly obtained from the Tampa Bay Buccaneers the first pick in the draft, and he took Marcus Mariota.
And the world was new.
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