"The thing for them, the Eagles, it's always money."


Brian Westbrook is apparently extremely bitter about being released by the Eagles and is now taking his new-found freedom as an opportunity to strike back via the radio airwaves.

"The thing for them, the Eagles, it's always money. It's always dollar signs," Westbrook told Dan Patrick on his radio show. "If they can find someone to do it a little bit cheaper, they'll go with that guy."

But that wasn't all. Patrick then asked Westbrook if making money or winning football games was most important to management.

"I've seen them go the money route with so many players," Westbrook said. "I wouldn't know. You'd have to ask someone with the Eagles. With the players, winning is a priority. With the management, I would hope winning is the priority -- but I don't know that."

John Gonzalez of the Philadelphia Inquirer points out these quotes, but as most in the mainstream "I hate everything the Eagles do" media, he misses the point completely.

"The Bird Brains out there - the small-minded sycophants who willfully submit to the Eagles brainwashing - will brand Westbrook disloyal and claim he's lashing out at the franchise for cutting him," Gonzalez writes. "The independent, on the other hand, will read his remarks and reel from the brutal candor."

I'm not exactly sure how to write this professionally, so I'll just say that this really pisses me off.

First off, I'm not even entirely sure who the hell this guy is. I've never read a thing written by him or about him, so my only assumption is that he doesn't usually even cover the Eagles.

He will attack those who are willing to attack Westbrook, as I'm about to do, because Westbrook is obviously speaking the truth, right?

Wrong.

Westbrook is bitter about his release and is letting it show. That doesn't mean that he's now no longer welcome in Philly or that we love him any less as a player, it just means that he's human.

The point here is that this claim that the Eagles don't spend money is completely unsubstantiated and downright false. Just because the Eagles didn't go after some of the bigger names in free agency the past few years, they're perceived as money-grubbing.

He's probably one of the guys who is still upset the Eagles didn't go hard after Javon Walker or didn't open their checkbooks to pay Lito Sheppard and keep him here. Last I checked, Walker can't even get on the field in Oakland and Sheppard is about four days from being unemployed.

Let's completely forget that the Eagles went out and got Jevon Kearse, Terrell Owens, Stacy Andrews, Asante Samuel, traded for Jason Peters, and traded up for Jeremy Maclin, Jerome McDougle, and Shawn Andrews.

Granted, there are some misses in there, but to say that the Eagles refuse to spend is completely disproven by those names. That's not even mentioning the fact that the Birds put in bids for the likes of Larry Fitzgerald, Randy Moss, and even offered some picks for Anquan Boldin.

They also reworked Donovan McNabb's deal last season for absolutely no reason other than they felt he deserved it. Sheldon Brown will get a new deal if and when he gets toward the end of his current one. Asking for a new deal when you've got four years left on your old one, and haven't outplayed it by that much, is a bad move.

I'm not sure there's a franchise in the league that would have reworked Brown's contract last season, and the Eagles are certainly no exception.

Then there's Westbrook who was given a contract extension and plenty of up-front money when the Eagles really didn't have to give him a penny. It was out of his loyalty throughout the years and his stellar play that they decided to give him the money he got.

But what did he do after receiving the money? Not a whole lot.

He had a decent season in '08 but I think we all saw that '09 was a complete disaster every time he touched the ball. He was running into his linemen, falling down after a one-to-two yard gain, and wasn't feared out of the backfield anymore.

As far as I'm concerned, giving him that extra money looks like a miss for them, yet he's still willing to come out and attack them.

The only true situation I can think of to point to the Eagles trying to pinch every penny at the expense of a player was Jeremiah Trotter back in '02, after the '01 season. He wasn't asking to be overpaid, but the Eagles tried to low-ball him and he left town.

But even that was made up for by the Birds when they welcomed him back in '04, kept him through '07, and brought him back last season.

Westbrook and Gonzalez should enter the political arena where it's not questioned when you make claims that can be completely disproven when the facts are presented.

But hey, who's going to let facts get in the way of Gonzalez's asinine rants or Westbrook's venting on every radio station in America?