Erasing doubts

Brian Dawkins’ seventh Pro Bowl selection was widely regarded as being in the lifetime achievement category.

The suspicion for two, maybe three years, is that Dawkins no longer has the speed that enabled him to cover wide receivers the way a cornerback should, and that has altered the defense because it has reduced how often coordinator Jim Johnson can send a cornerback on a blitz.

And the open speculation was that 2008 was going to be Dawkins’ last one in the NFL.

Like so much else in the Philadelphia Eagles’ equation, a lot of the perceptions changed last Sunday.

The 35-year-old Dawkins came up with a sack and two forced fumbles, both of which teammates returned for touchdowns, in the 44-6 victory over Dallas that has the Eagles headed to Minnesota for today’s NFC wild-card playoff game against the Vikings.

“Unfortunately, that comes with age,” Eagles Coach Andy Reid said of the scrutiny Dawkins was subjected to this season. “You’re going to be put under the microscope. As a football player, you are going to make mistakes. There will be plays where it doesn’t work for you no matter how old you are. The older you are the more that gets magnified, I think. But he just kept working through it.”

There was evidence early in the season that Dawkins could still come up with plays as he did Sunday, and as he did frequently during the overall run of four victories in five games that put the Eagles in the postseason. On one blitz of Pittsburgh’s Ben Roethlisberger, he got a sack, forced fumble and fumble recovery in the 15-9 victory over the Steelers that gave the Eagles a 2-1 start to the season.

But as the Eagles fell to 5-5-1 after a 13-13 tie with the Cincinnati Bengals and a 36-7 loss at Baltimore, speculation began to build that Dawkins was facing the last days of a 13-season career that makes him Philadelphia’s longest-serving pro sports team athlete.

It wasn’t only the fact he was 35 and in the last year of his contract. It was that he was 35 and the Eagles weren’t winning, and his play did not appear up to its usual, every-play, every-game standards.

“I definitely don’t say there’s not any truth to that,” Dawkins said. “You can look at it in a couple of different ways. You can look at it and say, ‘You know, maybe they are right -- maybe I am [slipping].’ Or you can look at it as a challenge, and I look at it as a challenge. I know what I can do for this team and I’ve said it. I know what I can still do. . . . So, you look at it as opportunity and all those things just add, you put more things on the pile for the field to burn and utilize it.”

Dawkins has been around so long he’s the only current Eagle whose playoff participation pre-dates the 1999-Reid era that has produced seven trips to the postseason. He made his playoff debut in 1996 as a rookie starter for the Ray Rhodes-coached Eagles.

But Dawkins will face the same challenge today in Minneapolis that he faced then: that of having to control just enough of his emotions to be effective.

“Just a lot of talking to myself,” Dawkins said. “Just telling myself over and over again to calm down and trying to focus on the team at hand, which is Minnesota, and what Minnesota is going to bring to the table and what I have to prepare myself for.”

Although the Eagles have offered no public clues about Dawkins’ future -- nor, for that matter, about Donovan McNabb’s and Reid’s futures -- Reid does not sound like a coach who doubts Dawkins’ ability to still get the job done.

“He worked as hard as you can work this [past] off-season,” Reid said. “He didn’t think he played very well the year before, and I think this year he’s just come out and put together a Pro Bowl season. This wasn’t a gift. This is something that he earned, and obviously, the respect of the players around the league and so on. Brian’s not out there asking for ballots, or votes on the ballots, so he earned this and it’s very well-deserved.”