I'll make this intro quick. This is just a few pre-draft notes heading into the big weekend. Enjoy this weekend. It's the only time where every fan has a reason to be optimistic. It won't last for everyone.

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Brian Dawkins was the type of person that if you had the privlege of spending time with, you became a better person because of it. He was the perfect role model in an era of horrible ones. Players like Brandon Marshall, Ron Artest, Milton Bradley and Sam Hurd have squandered their talents because of their poor life choices.

Dawkins was one of the greatest to ever play the game, but you wouldn't know it by listening to him. He is as humble as they come which says something for a player who was the best at his position.

He was as perfect off the field as he was on the field. He did everything great at the safety position, His ball skills, his tackling, play making ability, his coverage and his runn support were all outstanding.

As good as he was on the field, he was a better person off the field. He took time out of his busy schedule to answer questions on twitter. The best example of Dawkin's selflessness off the field was the Dan Leone situations in 2009. After the Eagles decided not to re-sign him following the 2008 season, Lincoln Financial Field gate chief Dan Leone was fired after posting some comments on facebook about his disappointment with the team following Dawkins departure. Dawkins gave his two allotted tickets to Leone for the Eagles-Broncos game in 2009. He wanted to show him just how much he appreciated his support.

Dawkins still has love for the city of Philadelphia and was even quoted by Rueben Frank on twitter: "It really hurt"(to see see Eagles) "fans go through what they went through last year."

There will never be a more beloved athlete or person in the city of Philadelphia than Brian Dawkins. Steve Van Buren was the best running back of his generation and won two NFL titles. Chuck Bednarik was the last of the 60 minute men. Donovan McNabb and Ron Jaworski were great franchise quarterbacks in their day.

But there will never be a better safety, a more intense player and a more perfect role model than Brian Dawkins. He truly was the ideal athlete in a sports-centered community.

WE LOVE YOU DAWK!

I think we are all getting sick of everyone and their mother doing a mock draft. It's fun to do and fun to see who knows what there talking about and who has absolutely no idea. We will get bombarded by mocks from here until about 8:00 on Thursday.

Here is something different. I wanted to get a pulse here at BGN on who is everyone's man crush. Who is the one prospect you want the Eagles to get more then anybody. Doesn't have to be a 1st rounder either. If your man crush is Dale Moss or, God help you, Vontzaze Im-Burfict, then that doesn't mean you want the Eagles to spend a 1st on him. Just that the player is your favorite in this draft class, you will make a customized Eagles jersey or set player for the draft(I did Kerrigan last year with tape over my Reggie Brown jersey) and you will completely lose your mind when you hear that player's name called. Here is a list of players for the poll with some analysis.

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This is a bit different then the post I did the other day on the top 5 targets. I am going to start this post with a mock draft of the first 14 picks and then looks at the five best players and where we should go from there.

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The first round is loaded with talent at almost every sinlge position. The Eagles are in great position with the 15th pick. Some have suggested that they might trade up but the cost isn't worth it. They would lose at least one of their 2nd round picks. Having 3 picks in the first 51 is huge this season. A lot of really great players will still be on the board in the second round. It's a great year to have two picks in the second round. You can't throw that away for one player who might be a complete bust.

Here is my list of the five prospects I like the best for the Eagles at 15. It's impossible to gauge exactly who will be available at that point and who will be gone so a couple of these players could be off the board. Maybe they are all off the board or maybe they are all still undrafted. Everybody has a great idea of how the draft will shake out at this point. A few picks into the first round, not so much.

My 5 Prospects after the jump.

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I have been studying the 2012 NFL Draft for a while and feel I have a good feel for which prospects fit our scheme, where players are going to fall and when we should select them. Of course I will be proved completely wrong come April 26th-28th, but hey I did an Eagles mock draft in the fan post section anyways. Here is my 6-round Eagles mock draft. Enjoy!

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[Note by JasonB, 03/20/12 7:05 PM EDT ] If you need a palette cleanser from the Tebow talk, Midwestern Eagles Fan has some good talking points here.

Stephen Tulloch would of been a perfect fit for our defense. He knows how to play the run in the wide-9 scheme. I hope Detroit over-paid for him or I am going to be very disappointed. Clearly Andy Reid doesn't think much over linebackers who can't cover the pass. He won't pay much for them at all. That's acceptable at this point in the NFL but you have to have at least capable players at linebacker.

It would be like a baseball team having a great offense with Joe Blanton as their ace and J.C. Romero as their closer. If you have a major glaring weakness it will be exposed. If you have a minor weakness, you can get away with it. The Giants won the Super Bowl with a decent secondary and okay linebacker. They had plenty of other strengths and their weaknesses weren't overbearing.

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Just wanted to take a few minutes and write some quick notes on a few players that I really like. Here's a hint, Vontaze Burfict isn't one of them. He's a better fit in the 3-4 as a ILB. Too much responsibility as a 4-3 MIKE for such an immature player. Even Ryan Leaf thinks he's too immature for the NFL. Anywho, here's some prospects:

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The Eagles are done. I have accepted that. Now is the time between when we suffer through the rest of our season and when the playoffs begin and we can enjoy watching some great football without the stress of seeing yet another Super Bowl dream end in Philly.

I have gone over some things about our football team in my head and I think I have learned some things over the past couple months, mainly that we don't have enough football players. I'll explain after the jump.

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Now that our season is pretty much over I expect a lot of our great fans here at BGN will start talking about our Super Bowl next April. Clearly Linebacker is our biggest need. It's a position that needs a guy who can change the mentality of the defense. Zach Brown and Dont'a Hightower are the two guys I decided to profile. Hightower is one of my favorite linebackers in the upcoming class and Brown is one of the most popular on the early Eagles mock boards.

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With Michael Vick's status up in the air and the reports that Vince Young has been studying hard, I thought it would be a good time to take a look at both Young and Vick and discuss who is our better option Sunday night and beyond this season.

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As some of you might have guessed, I am an Eagles fan living in the midwest. I deal with several Bears fans so this game means more to me than it does to most Eagles fans. Losing to the Bears last year hurt a lot. It kept us out of contention for a first round bye. This year's annual Eagles-Bears game looks completely different than it did last season. Both teams have gone through some big changes with one team on the rise and the other on a major decline. 

Here's how each teams looks this year versus last year and how they matchup against each other.

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Five weeks in the books and we still have a lot of teams that could become serious contenders and fall back down to earth once they start getting into the heart of their schedule. The only teams right now that look like playoff teams right now are the Packers, Saints, Lions, Patriots and maybe the Ravens.

The Chargers are 4-1 but they have yet to look impressive. The Steelers have looked either past their prime or Super Bowl worthy. The 49ers are 4-1 but would anyone really be afraid to play them right now? The Jets, Eagles and Bears are all complete disappointments so far but neither team is really that far off from being back in the playoff picture.

I'm going to try and take some time out every week and talk about and pick each game. I analyze more than who has the better team. You really have to consider the human element of each game. Sometimes one team just badly needs a win and that is the difference in a big game. Other times a team is coming off a big win and they are setting themselves up for a let down. Unlike basketball, football is such an emotional game. If one team just flat out wants it more than the other for whatever reason, they usually come out on top.

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I have always been the positive Eagles fan. I backed Donovan McNabb in good times and bad for his entire career as an Eagle and have backed Andy Reid for the last 12 seasons. We all know it's been a rough start to the season.

We can't tackle. We can't take care of the ball. We stink in the red zone and our run defense is beyond bad. Having said that I still feel like we will be okay this season.  A few improvements and we can fix the problems that have cost us four straight losses.

I would chalk our season up so far to just really awful luck. If Jeremy Maclin doesn't drop that pass on our final drive against the Falcons in Week 2 we win. In Week 3 it was our one single touchdown in five red zone trips along with Vick being knocked out in the third quarter. In Week 4 it was two missed field goals in the red zone and that fumble by Jeremy Maclin. In Week 5, as reported earlier here on BGN it was Jason Avants first two fumbles since 2006 that cost us in a game where we had five turnovers.

So here we are at 1-4 in a loaded division that you probably have to win 12 games to come out on top...OH WAIT, everyone stinks in our division. The Redskins are 3-1 but does anyone really think they get past 9-7 or maybe 10-6. The Cowboys are horribly inconsistent and can't be counted on for much more than 8-8 or 9-7. Then theres the Giants. I pegged them as a 5-11 team before the season started and now they are 2-3 and I don't know how they'll finish, but they probably won't win more than 7 games unless their defense improves.

Our next two games are against the Skins and the Boys. We win both those games we are 3-4, the Skins are 4-2 or 3-3 and the Cowboys are 2-4 or 3-3. We would be right in the thick of things just two weeks after our season was completely lost.

We gotta start tackling better. We have to run the ball more. We have to convert in the red zone and we have to protect the football. These aren't the type of adjustments that take a couple big trades or free agent pickups to fix. Tackling is all about effort and technique. Playcalling is on Andy and Marty. We looked better in the red zone and turnovers I would chalk up to bad luck and too many passes.

The offense is actually better than last season and will get even better as the season goes along. Our defensive line has 16 sacks through the first five games. We have our weaknesses but so do the Green Bay Packers. No team is perfect, it's all about improving each week.

Hope is not lost. Reid has two games to prove it to the rest of the Eagles Nation.

I love comparisions and analogies. I try and use them a lot in my writing and this comparision seems fitting. Last year's Flyers team was the most frustrating sports team to follow for an entire season. The talent was there and the coach had a Stanley Cup title to his name but the team always underperformed. How they are similar after the jump.

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Sunday was bad on some many levels. The coaching decisions and play calling was just plain awful. If your name isn't LeSean McCoy, Jason Peters, Trent Cole, Cullen Jenkins, Jason Babin or Brian Rolle you had a bad game.

Still it's just one game. The team will recover and we will become a better team because of this. The thing that is the most frustrating about all of this is that when we got all these great players our expectations greatly rose. I expected the Giants to beat us once this season but not like this.

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A lot of people here at BGN came out of the closet and professed their man crush for Casey Matthews last spring, which is cool. Matthews was a good linebacker in college. He has great football instincts and his brothers is an absolute beast, Literally. I'm not as big of a fan of Matthews. I have my own man crush, Mike Friggin' Kafka.

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The geniuses that be at ESPN will be reiterating the same stuff all season about our Eagles team. I thought I'd take a few minutes to analyze and discuss our so-called problems. Sometimes it seems like these guys at ESPN don't even watch the games, they just repeat what everyone else is already saying. So here's my take on our critiques from Week 1.

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3 Keys for both teams to come out with a win on Sunday.

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Okay, so I'm no Michael Lombardi nor do I have a profound mathmatical the will literally blow your mind. I am not be one of the many experts at ESPN, but hey I'm bored and have some thoughts on our beloved/hated division.

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First of all I want to say I love the Eagles fan base. We are probably the only fan base in the NFL that actually gives a crap about our PS. 95% of cowboys fans probably don't even know they have a practice squad. First let's go over the rules.

You can't be on the same practice squad for more than two seasons and you aren't eligible for the squad if you have accrued 9 games on the active roster. IR isn't the practice squad.

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With everyone worried about our offensive line and our linebacking core, I thought I'd make a quick points on how they will be much better than people are expecting. This is just an opinion piece to generate some discussion, not a detailed analysis that I copied and pasted from Footabll Outsiders.

The linebacking core will be outstanding in pass coverage. I don't have to prove to you guys with stats that tight ends have torn us up the last few seasons. I remember a game against Tampa Bay maybe two years ago where we easily beat them but Kellen Winslow had close to 125 receiving yards. Matthews and Chaney are outstanding in pass coverage already. They have a combined two regular season starts between them and will continue to great better and better over the next five seasons before the reach their primes. When you have 3 stud CB's and two pretty decent safeties that makes it very hard to move the ball thru the air but when you combine that with a very good set of coverage LB's as well, New Orleans and Green Bay doesn't sound so scary anymore. Remember, we contained a hot Green Bay team last year without good coverage LB's, Patterson at RCB and no pass rush. All that will dramitcally change this season.

Our O-line will be a work in progress, but it will be one of the best by the end of the regular season if they can stay healthy. Jason Peters will be great as long as he is healthy, enough said. Evan Mathis can hold his own and has a nice nasty streak. The guy never looks happy and that is a good thing for a guy in the trenches. Jason Kelce is a good athletic center that Howard Mudd really likes, but he isn't a high draft pick. Cue that obvious Jeff Saturday reference. Danny Watkins is learning a new position four years after learning a new sport. He will have his rookie woes but will improve as the season goes along. Todd Herremans is at his natural position. Worst case scenario he stinks and we plug in King Dunlap he did well in two preseason starts or we put in last year's start Winston Justice once he is 100%. Best case scenrio we will have once of the best tackles combos in the league. Playing in a division with two outstanding edge rushers in DeMarcus Ware and Brian Orakpo will be easier with a more atlhetic line than our old we're bigger than your are line.

The key to a Super Bowl run is for a team to be clicking at the right time. Both units will get better and better each week. Think of where they could be by the playoffs.