I’d bet if you randomly logged on to the blog of another NFL team, you’d find much the same as you now see here: fans cursing the capriciousness of the football gods for this injury or that injury suffered by this player or that on their favorite team.

Yeah, it’s a cliché. But it’s also a truism that injuries happen to all teams. Remember back in the preseason when it seemed like Philly was losing a key player every other day? Or how the Super Bowl Champs lost Polamalu – the heart and soul of their D – in the first game for several weeks? Or Da Bears losing Urlacher for the year on opening day? But big wheel keeps on turnin’, Proud Mary keeps on burnin’.

I think it’s one of the byproducts of this internet age in which we live. We can now follow every minute by minute development as it happens in real time instead of reading a condensed, two paragraph summation of the day’s events in tomorrow’s paper. Nowadays, any botched snaps in practice; each silly comment by a player; and every bump, bruise and strained hammy generates dozens of threads and hundreds of comments on a myriad of blogs. Each individual development takes on a life of its own, growing in importance to the point where it eclipses the big picture.

And what is the “big picture” as far as the 2009 edition of the G-Men are concerned? Defensively (where the injury bug has taken the biggest bite) we still have a relatively healthy Osi, Tuck, Kiwi, Robbins, Bernard & Cofield on the D-line. That’s already better than last year’s bunch – and if Canty returns in a few weeks, the improvement there could be off the charts. At LB, Pierce is playing much better than he did in ‘08, Wilk is finally healthy and might be able to hold down the weakside until Boley gets back. Again, an improvement over last year. The secondary has been hardest hit. Losing KP for the year was a huge blow and we’ve yet to see one of our starting CBs take the field. Yet with the ascendance of Webster to elite shutdown corner status, the emergence of Thomas and rookie find Bruce Johnson, that unit is playing nearly as well as last year’s bunch.

As far as the offense is concerned, so long as Eli and the starting O-line are good to go, we’ll be fine. That unit should be able to weather an injury to any other part of the offense. Lose Eli, of course, and all bets are off. And his health could very well be at risk should one of the big uglies up front go down. Anyone else on the offense – yes, even the RBs – I think could be replaced without too much of a falloff in production (and if you think I’m crazy, recall that the Steelers lost Parker and Mendenhall fairly early last year and had to rely on Mewelde Moore as their feature back for much of 2008. Didn’t work out too badly for ’em in the end)

All in all, big picture-wise, I’d say that even with the recent rash of injuries, we’re in better shape than we were at this time last year. And that team only started the year 11-1 while playing one of the most hellacious regular season schedules in memory. I guess you could say that I still like our chances.

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