Reich: Carson Wentz ‘Has So Much Stinkin’ Juice’

PHILADELPHIA (973espn.com) - One of the disconnects stemming from the incendiary PhillyVoice.com report on Eagles quarterback Carson Wentz earlier this week is the false equivalency that traits like an uncompromising nature are automatically negative when you are talking about star athletes.

Long before some Eagles fans were somehow blindsided by the realization that Wentz is a Type A personality who believes in himself former offensive coordinator Frank Reich laid that bread trail many times for those actually paying attention.

Make no mistake, however, that Reich loved Wentz as a player and even more so as a person when the veteran coach called Philadelphia home and any frustration over Wentz speaking up and questioning things when it came to the offense or refusing to heed advice on protecting himself was always chalked up to what coaches dream about for every student, the competitiveness to care.

Reich, now the head coach in Indianapolis, was visiting with WFAN in New York earlier this week and was asked about his former QB in the wake of the "controversy/

"It makes me laugh because having been there two years, having been a part of the process of drafting him there and getting to know him the way that I know him, there’s just few people in this league that I think highly of than Carson," Reich explained. "I know him very, very close. And I’m not just saying this to defend him, and I don’t need to defend him, his teammates are doing that quite well. But this guy is a humble guy. This guy is a competitor, though. He knows what he wants. This guy is a leader."

Then came the money line which should put any concern over Wentz to rest even from the small portion of the fan base which might believe Nick Foles is a better option.

"This guy has so much stinkin’ juice, it’s unreal," Reich said of Wentz.

In many ways, Reich was the crux of the report which intimated that Wentz's old offensive boss would “rein Wentz in and stop him from going off-point” while the QB has "bullied" current OC Mike Groh.

Reich though is on record of not being able to rein in anything at times, particularly when it came to the thought of Wentz protecting himself

”It definitely went in one ear and out the other early on,” Reich said when he was here. “It didn’t go exactly like this, but this is just made up to protect the innocent or protect the guilty, however you say it. We would say to him, ‘Hey, you just need to kind of back off on some of this tackling stuff.’ And he didn’t quite say it like this, but it was essentially, ‘No. I’m not backing off. This is me. This is how I play.’”

And that's where the disconnect starts. There is nothing wrong with having a QB who believes in himself, especially one with a default setting that reboots to winning.

"He’s another one of these elite quarterbacks that, what I used to be [there] he didn’t care one thing about stats," Reich said. "Like, at the end of the day, I love that about him. The two years that I worked with him, at the end of the day, he’s not a guy who’s checking his stat line because he wants to make sure he’s breaking this record. All he wanted to do was win."

-John McMullen covers the Eagles and the NFL for 973espn.com. You can reach him at jmcmullen44@gmail.com or on Twitter @JFMcMullen