The Onside Kick
September 3, 2000
When Eagles special teams coach John Harbaugh first approached special teams captain Ike Reese with the plan, Reese just stared at him
An onside kick? To open the season?
“He was scared it wouldn’t work,” Harbaugh says now. “He said, ‘You’re kidding me. No freaking way.’”
Harbaugh wasn’t kidding. And eventually, Reese came around - sort of.
“I told him, ‘If you feel we can do it, let’s do it,’” Reese said. “But I was saying to myself, ‘These are the Cowboys. We’re on the road. It’s the first game of the season. What if it doesn’t work?’”
The Eagles were 14–33-1 in the previous three years. They hadn’t won an opener since 1996. They had won just one of their last 10 games at Texas Stadium.
“You’re talking about a team that was looking for something to grab onto, some hope to grab onto,” Reese says now. “A team that was tired of being kicked around, tired of being called the worst team in the league. We needed some reassurance that we were good.”
As early as mid-August, second-year head coach Andy Reid had decided that if the Eagles lost the coin toss on opening day, the season would begin with an onside kick. Reid had noticed that the Cowboys’ kick-return unit was vunerable to an onside kick. And he wanted to open the season with something dramatic, something to help make the Eagles relevant again.
“Prior to the game, Andy came into the huddle, and he was like, ‘What do you all think of doing an onside kick?’” Reese said. “First of all, it’s the opening kickoff of the season, so we’re ready to go down the field and kill somebody anyway. So he asked us do we think we can recover the football, and we were all in a tizzy. ‘Yeah, we will recover.’”
David Akers kicked it, Dameane Douglas recovered it, and three hours later the Eagles had stunned the favored Cowboys, 41–14, matching their most lopsided win ever against their biggest rival.
“I’m on the sideline and I was so damn nervous I could barely stand up,” said Harbaugh, now head coach of the Ravens. “I thought (Cowboys special teams coach) Joe Avezzano was staring at me, and I was trying to act nonchalant.
When Akers kicked it, I remember thinking, ‘Oh crap, we’re actually doing it.”
Other than Reid, Harbaugh and the guys on the kickoff team, nobody knew what was coming.
“I’m watching Dave get ready to kick off and I’m thinking, ‘Boy, his approach looks funny,’” said Brad Childress, then the Eagles’ quarterbacks coach and now head coach of the Vikings. “Then it was, ‘Holy crap. I can’t believe we’re doing this.’”
Reid and Harbaugh had noticed the front line of the Cowboys’ kick return unit cheated back too soon, dropping off before the ball was even kicked.
“You’re taught as a return team to not take off until you see the ball kicked,” Reese said. “But we knew their front line bailed out early, and that’s exactly what they did.”
Akers plopped the ball in the air for 12 yards - two more than the required 10 yards. Reese and fellow linebackers Barry Gardner and Mike Caldwell formed a wall around the football and the sure-handed Douglas caught it on a fly at the 42-yard line.
“It worked out perfectly,” Reese said. “Akers did a great job selling it, and by the time they realized what happened,it was too late and D1 (Douglas) didn’t have any resistance. We actually didn’t even need to block anybody because they bailed out so fast.”
Nine plays later, Donovan McNabb, making his first opening-day start, threw a one-yard touchdown pass to tight end Jeff Thomason, and the rout was on. Duce Staley finished with 201 rushing yards - the most by an Eagle in
51 years - and the defense knocked Troy Aikman out of the game before the first quarter ended.
“The element of surprise can have a great effect on a team,” Staley said. “A lot of times, teams can’t handle it. They’re going out there to start the game, they’ve got their plays ready, they’re set to march down the field. All of a sudden, we get the ball back and it takes all the air out for them. I don’t think they ever recovered from those first four or five seconds of that game.”
The Eagles made the playoffs, their first of seven trips to the postseason in the next nine years. And it all started with that onside kick.
“It was a statement about what kind of team we were going to be,” Harbaugh said. “It said we weren’t afraid, we weren’t scared. It said, ‘If these crazy bastards will open the season with an onside kick on the road, they’ll try anything.’”
