Some high comedy (and low-level controversy) in the past 48 hours surrounding the Eagles’ final roster cuts, which were officially announced Saturday afternoon but which had been unofficially (and, it turns out, incorrectly) posted to the Eagles mobile site (which doesn’t work on my Motorola Q’s browser, I might add) Friday afternoon. WIP and the Eagles blogs caught on pretty quickly, posted the cuts, and bam (!) — the Birds have a mini PR crisis.

While GM Tom Heckert said that the screwups (5 players on the premature list were actually incorrect) with the web site weren’t such a big deal, but that didn’t stop Eagles Insider/ Minister of Information and Education Dave Spadaro from falling on his sword:

“I fully accept responsibility for the situation,” Spadaro said. “We screwed up. It’s not an accurate list. We don’t know the [real] list. We were not in contact with anybody, other than ourselves.”

Look at that! The guy who’s paid to evaluate the performance of his coworkers on the company web site is exposed himself! I wonder if some of the players and coaches were snickering about this? (Probably not. They probably don’t care.) Still, we have to appreciate the irony inherent in the official critic having to face some public criticism for the first time — this was sort of his post-game press conference after a big loss.

While most of the fanbase on WIP and on the message boards tend to hate on Spadaro, I’ve got no beef with the guy. When the “real” media bristle at Spuds asking questions in the “real” press conferences, I sort of giggle a bit. Boys, we’re not talking about matters of state here. It’s a TV show. Just because the core content owners realized there’s cash to be made in creating and distributing downstream meta-content via their own channels doesn’t mean that Spuds is a bad guy. He isn’t doing PR for Stalin, he’s making sure there’s enough content to keep visitors to philadelphiaeagles.com properly sated. Asking softball questions to Andy Reid isn’t exactly equivalent to not challenging WMD reports, mmmkay?

Link:
It’s official: Johnson, Bloom among cuts [Philly.com]
Birds’ web site unofficially lists cut players [Daily News]