McCaffery

White House visit. “We did something last season that was a milestone in the city of Philadelphia and for our organization. But it is what it is.”

Pederson claimed that would be his “blanket statement,” but he knew that an is-what-itis dismissal would be insufficient protection. So the questions kept coming, and he kept trying to be polite. It was not unlike Brett Brown being expected by the Sixers to keep explaining why Joel Embiid needed to take two years off. When asked about how the Eagles went from planning a trip to Washington to instead using Tuesday for another summertime workout for a fall-winter sport, Pederson even pretended not to comprehend the question. But maybe he didn’t know how it all happened. Maybe he is just a football coach trying to win games and locker-room allies. That’s why somebody in that organization, preferably one wearing a tie and not a coaching visor, should have broken down that play-by-play.

“We’re united,” Pederson said. “We’re a team. It’s been that way since I’ve been here.”

They weren’t united. They were splintered. Where is that confusion? Some players wanted to visit the White House. Others did not. Didn’t Pederson say he wanted to go? But some kind of inhouse breakdown so tilted the locker-room mood that the Eagles could have traveled to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. in one minivan. Once that happened, President Trump did exactly as he should have and told them all to save the gas.

By Wednesday, the locker room filled with more reporters from more places than there were during the Super Bowl build-up.

“Do we look like we want attention?” Nelson Agholor said. “We want to play football. Today, we tried to get better. That was the most important thing for us.”

By then, it was. Yet some athletes have come to believe that winning a championship puts them in positions to use a friendly invitation to the White House as an obligation to protest. For too many, it’s to the point where they wait to be invited just so they can yell that they don’t want to go. No one is forced to go. But no one should be forced to invite them, either.

“I’m not going to speak for other teams,” Pederson said. “I just know that I was looking forward to it. Listen, you win a world championship or an NCAA title or any championship and you want to be recognized that way. I think it’s great. But, again, I’m not going to speak for other teams. I was looking forward to it.”

If there ever were a time for the White House invitations to athletes to stop, it was 1985, when a championship basketball team from Villanova went and its point guard, Gary McLain, showed up so admittedly high on cocaine that Sports Illustrated commissioned him to detail the experience in a cover story. Yet the White House tradition not only continued, but grew. In recent years, it’s been amazing anything has gotten done in the Oval Office with all the time needed to accept No. 1 replica jerseys from pro teams, college teams, amateur teams, women’s teams, men’s teams, Olympic teams, whatever. All presidents have the same motivation for such manufactured stunts: To flip the championship efforts of others into votes for themselves. So if the tradition has turned hyper-political, they know who to blame.

The president did what he had to do because enough Eagles were planning to do what they felt they had to do. By nature, both football and politics can be dirty. Mix them, and it is a mud slide.

“It’s over,” Doug Pederson said. “It’s behind us. We’re moving on.”

So he went out to the practice field where, soon after, Lurie would come strolling onto the field, essentially in coach’s gear, shorts and a white ball cap, standing far, far away from where the press were permitted to roam.

There were plays to be run, and the Eagles would trust a championship head coach to make them work. Contact Jack McCaffery @jmccaffery@21stcenturymedia.com; follow him on Twitter @JackMcCaffery