PHILADELPHIA — Thirty-four years have passed since Mike Quick was one-half of what was supposed to be, and probably should have been, the best wide-receiving duo the Eagles have ever had. It was 1988. Quick had been to five straight Pro Bowls, eclipsing 1,000 receiving yards in a season three times, catching 11 touchdown passes in just 12 games during the strike-truncated 1987 campaign. Cris Carter, whom the Eagles had selected in the ‘87 supplementary draft and who went on to catch 1,101 passes in his Hall of Fame career, was entering his first full season in the NFL. It would have been reasonable to envision Randall Cunningham dropping back, closing his eyes, chucking the football blindly down the field, and having either Quick or Carter haul it in.
“I thought,” Quick said in a recent phone interview, “we’d be tough to deal with.”
Everyone did. But Quick’s body began to betray him: He broke his leg five games into the ‘88 season, had surgery on both of his knees the year after that, and tore his right quadriceps the year after that, playing just 18 games over those three years. Meanwhile, Carter’s drug and alcohol addiction compelled the Eagles to release him in 1990. That’s the thing about the Eagles and their wide-receiver tandems: Often, the promise has outstripped the production. And that cautious note is an appropriate one to strike before this season, because it is easy to get ahead of yourself when you think about A.J. Brown, DeVonta Smith, and the damage those two could do to opposing defenses. After all, they haven’t played together yet.
