Author: Marcus Hayes

Eagles GM Howie Roseman and owner Jeffrey Lurie make the big decisions, and most of their decisions in the past five years turned out to be sound. But they didn’t take a single snap, run a meeting, or call a play during the Eagles’ five consecutive playoff runs, culminating Saturday in the first back-to-back NFC East championships since Andy Reid’s Eagles did it four times from 2001-04.

Five straight postseason runs ties those Reid-era Eagles for most consecutive playoff appearances. It also is the longest active streak, technically, but Buffalo (six straight from 2019-24) and Tampa Bay (five straight) both have a chance to extend theirs. Kansas City’s 10-year run, which is second only to the Patriots’ 11-year run, just ended; the Eagles’ win in KC on Sept. 14 helped to exclude Reid and his Chiefs.

In all cases, consistent excellence and dedication have pushed a wealth of talent to accomplish what is every NFL team’s goal at the start of every season. These are the front line people who were a part of it in Philly for all of the last five years:

Nick Sirianni, whose coaching ability far outstripped anyone’s expectations. On Saturday, he tied George Seifert as the coach with the most regular-season and playoff wins in his first five seasons as a head coach in the Super Bowl era, but Sirianni’s 64 wins are much more impressive than Seifert’s. Seifert inherited a Super Bowl team with legends all over the 49ers roster. Sirianni inherited Jalen Reagor.

Jalen Hurts, whose quarterbacking ability far outstripped anyone’s expectations. His 61 wins, including playoffs, rank third behind the Chiefs’ Patrick Mahomes and the Bills’ Josh Allen.

Lane Johnson, right tackle, who might be the best Eagle ever.

DeVonta Smith, wide receiver, who already is the Eagles’ all-time leader in playoff receiving yards with 595.

Landon Dickerson, left guard, part of the best left side in Eagles offensive line history.

Jordan Mailata, left tackle, the other part of the best left side in Eagles offensive line history.

Brandon Graham, defensive lineman, who was drafted in 2010, retired after 2024, unretired in mid-2025, changed positions from end to tackle two weeks ago, and has three sacks since.

Jake Elliott, who has missed five of his last 11 kicks, but who set a Super Bowl record in February with 16 points when he made four field goals in New Orleans.

Dallas Goedert, tight end, whose 52 postseason catches are a franchise record.

Jeff Stoutland, the offensive line coach and the best assistant in the history of Philadelphia.

Michael Clay, special teams coordinator, who entered the NFL coaching ranks in 2014 thanks to former Eagles coach Chip Kelly, who should be credited for a lot of changes in Eagles culture.

Kevin Patullo, first-year offensive coordinator, former passing game coordinator, and Sirianni’s longtime majordomo. Currently, he is unpopular.

Jemal Singleton, running backs coach and current assistant head coach who has overseen the best seasons of Saquon Barkley, D’Andre Swift, and Miles Sanders.

Jason Michael, the tight ends coach who made Goedert a top-five tight end and helped sixth-rounder Grant Calcaterra last for four years in the NFL.

Aaron Moorehead, the receivers coach tasked with keeping A.J. Brown in line.

Jeremiah Washburn, who has coached edge rushers including Nolan Smith, Jalyx Hunt, Jaelan Phillips, and Josh Sweat. Also Bryce Huff and Joshua Uche.

“Big” Dom DiSandro, security chief, Howie’s adviser, game-day and sideline sheriff, whose basic job it is to keep everybody safe and out of trouble.

Honorable mention: Lurie and Roseman delegate liberally, and their scouts and support staff are remarkably loyal and proficient.

DK Metcalf’s swing at fan costs Steelers

Late in the second quarter of their game in Detroit, Steelers wide receiver DK Metcalf approached a blue-wigged Lions fan in the stands and exchanged words. He then grabbed the fan’s shirt, pulled the fan down closer to him, then appeared to try and strike the fan as he released the fan’s shirt and walked away. Metcalf, through reported sources, claimed the fan, with whom he interacted during last year’s game, used a racial slur and also insulted Metcalf’s mother.

Metcalf remained in the game — officials afterward said they didn’t see it happen. The league apparently did not believe Metcalf’s explanation of provocation or didn’t believe it warranted his action.

He was suspended (as always, without pay, in this case $555,556) for the Steelers’ last two games, which could be devastating. The Steelers, 9-6 and atop the AFC North, face the Browns, then the 7-8 Ravens to finish the year. Metcalf plans to appeal the decision.

Refs got it right

Social media, Rams fans, and Lions fans nearly shared a group embolism after several unusual plays with intricate rules applications affected the outcomes of games with significant playoff implications — plays on which officials ultimately landed on the correct calls, with no room for argument.

On Thursday night, the Seahawks were granted a two-point conversion that tied their game with the Rams, 30-30, on a bizarre sequence:

Sam Darnold threw a backward pass to Zach Charbonnet, which deflected off Rams linebacker Jared Verse’s hand, then his helmet. The second deflection sent the ball forward, just over the goal line. As Charbonnet dejectedly retrieved the ball, a whistle blew.

Officials gathered to discuss the play and they ruled that, even though the whistle blew, the ball remained live. Further, since there is a distinction between a backward pass and a fumble — the offense cannot advance a fumble on a two-point conversion — Charbonnet’s recovery was valid.

Not only did the refs get this right, TV rules analyst Terry McAulay immediately explained why officials were discussing the play and he accurately predicted a reversal. Minutes later, the Football Zebras account took to Twitter/X and explained the intricacies of the determination.

If you’re interested, early Friday morning McAulay used his own entertaining Twitter/X account to further explain and defend his comments and opinion, including a quote-tweet of one of his posts from 2023, which explains the rules and emphasizes the confusion regarding the whistle. This includes a reply to an esteemed, retired Inquirer writer who covered the Eagles.

You might not agree with the rules enforced here, but they have existed for a long time, and they were appropriately applied. That said, I understand the outrage. I’ve been covering the NFL for 35 years and I’ll admit that I wasn’t sure what I was watching. I am sure, however, that, between the nuances of the backward pass and the whistle, I would have gotten at least part of it wrong.

The refs, in the end, did not.

Notably, this all happened with more than six minutes to play in regulation. Each team had three more possessions before overtime, so the conversion didn’t directly determine the winner. Each team scored a touchdown in overtime, and after the Seahawks scored the answering TD they were successful with a bold, if benign, two-point conversion. The win put them at 12-3, gave them the current top seed in the NFC, and the lead in the NFC West over the 11-4 Rams.

On Sunday evening, another bizarre play did determine the winner of the Steelers-Lions game, with possibly even greater playoff consequences that included a third team.

The Lions drove to the Steelers’ 1-yard line with 25 seconds to play, trailing by five points. They scored a touchdown on the next play, but it was nullified by offensive pass interference on Jameson Williams, called for an illegal pick on a Steelers defender. Good call.

Two plays later, the final play of the game, Jared Goff hit Amon-Ra St. Brown near the goal line. St. Brown was stopped but not declared down; instead, he lateraled to Goff, who vaulted into the end zone for a touchdown after time expired.

Unfortunately, Goff had vaulted past two flags on the ground. Brown had clearly pushed his defender away to get open.

A lengthy discussion determined that St. Brown had indeed committed offensive pass interference before the catch. The penalty nullified the touchdown. Since time had expired, the game was over.

The fallout: The Steelers clinched a playoff spot for the 49ers and essentially ended the Lions’ season, since, due to tiebreaker rules, the 8-7 Lions now cannot catch the 10-4 49ers in the wild-card race. The Steelers, now 9-6, also greatly improved their own postseason hopes with a crazy 29-24 win in Detroit, where they were seven-point underdogs.

Anyway, kudos, refs.

Then, on Sunday Night Football, as if to spite their few supporters, officials failed to call a blatant pass interference penalty against the Ravens late in the Patriots’ comeback win at Baltimore, probably the worst missed call of the year. The Pats still scored on that drive and won the game, but come on, fellas.

Extra points

The Bears’ comeback win over the Packers on Saturday night virtually locked the Eagles into the No. 3 seed behind the Seahawks (12-3) and the Bears (11-4). … The Chiefs could be moving from Missouri to Kansas to secure a new stadium, with an announcement coming as soon as Monday afternoon. … The Patriots’ win not only locked in their first playoff berth since 2021, it gave them a 12-3 record, same as the Broncos, who lost in Jacksonville (11-4), though the Patriots lose the top-seed tiebreaker against the Broncos (common opponents). … The Jags have won six in a row.

LANDOVER, Md. — It seems ungrateful to complain about any win, particularly a win that ensures a fifth consecutive trip to the playoffs, and the team in question won the latest Super Bowl.

It seems doubly thankless to whine about the coach and staff that largely have been responsible for this windfall of January football, delivered with an NFC East title earned Saturday with a 29-18 win over the Commanders.

So yes, it seems ungrateful, and even thankless, to wish for better.

But we are Philadelphia, aren’t we?

“We’ve raised the expectations of what to expect,” Nick Sirianni said.

He gets it.

Sirianni shepherded his Eagles into Northwest Stadium to face a 4-10 Commanders team that played without its starting quarterback for the first two-thirds of the game, then played without its backup the rest of the way.

Sirianni’s offensive line was overwhelmed for the first three quarters. His quarterback, Jalen Hurts, was confused most of the evening, typical of Hurts’ meetings with Commanders coach Dan Quinn, the former defensive coordinator for Dallas.

Sirianni’s curious decision to try a two-point conversion instead of kicking a PAT with a 27-10 lead with 4 minutes, 46 seconds to play was the cherry on top. Sirianni said it was simple math, but his postgame handshake with Quinn was very brief. So they got the 19-point lead, but at what cost? A scrum broke out as the scoreboard turned to 29-10. The scrum immediately followed the successful conversion, and it led to the ejection of two Commanders and one Eagle, right guard Tyler Steen. All could face suspensions.

The scrum was precipitated, at least in part, by what some Commanders perceived as Sirianni running up the score against a hapless team using its third-string quarterback. Commanders linebacker Bobby Wagner certainly seemed to be expressing those sentiments to Hurts as the fighting subsided.

Asked afterward what he thought of the two-point try, Wagner replied tersely, “I didn’t understand it.”

Was it a diss?

“Was it disrespectful? Maybe,” Wagner said. “We’ve got to stop them. We’ll see them in a couple of weeks.”

Quinn was less gracious.

“Hey, man, that’s how they want to get down? All good,” he said. “We play them again in two weeks.”

So yes, the hosts were not happy with Sirianni, and that animosity will linger when the Commanders visit Philadelphia for the season finale in two weeks.

The fight (loosely defined; there was no damage done) was the oddest incident of the Saturday, 5 p.m. start, which was itself an oddity. Maybe the unconventionality of the game produced the overarching atmosphere of weirdness.

There was more strangeness in a first half that ended with the Eagles in a 10-7 hole.

Jake Elliott missed field goal tries of 43, 57, and 52 yards, all wide left, the last two almost consecutively. (The 57-yarder was wiped by an offsides penalty and didn’t officially count as a miss, but still mattered.)

Hurts missed A.J. Brown with an easy third-down pass.

Will Shipley fumbled the opening kickoff, which gifted the Commanders three points. He then brought another out of the end zone; kneeling would have given them the ball at the 35, but it wound up costing the Eagles 16 yards.

Near the end of the half the Eagles had to call a timeout … coming out of a timeout.

This is not the stuff of champions.

Well, maybe NFC East champions, but the NFC East stinks this season, and besides, the NFC East championship is not the goal, is it? Super Bowl LX is the goal, and it seemed unrealistic after Saturday.

There were just too many glaring mistakes and omissions.

Chief among them: Tight end Dallas Goedert, who had 14 catches for 148 yards two touchdowns the previous two weeks, was not even targeted until the second half.

When the Eagles finally deigned to include the best postseason pass-catcher in their history, it worked out. He caught passes of 8 yards, then 9 yards, drew a penalty on third-and-8 (unaccepted due to a more penal, simultaneous penalty), and then, on third-and-goal from the 15 thanks to offensive line penalties, caught a 15-yard TD pass that gave the Eagles a 14-10 lead.

The TD pass gave Goedert 10 this season after catching a total of eight the previous three seasons combined.

This is the guy who hadn’t been targeted.

Commanders quarterback Marcus Mariota left the game with a hand injury after the first series of the second half, which left the Commanders with Josh Johnson and no backup. They might better have gone with the no backup.

Johnson threw an interception on his first series, a floater across the field to Cooper DeJean at the Commanders’ 37-yard line. The Birds turned it into a touchdown, but it took them seven plays, the last two of which were Saquon Barkley runs of 8 and 12 yards — tough, punishing, bell-cow runs behind a line that finally asserted itself properly.

Barkley finished with 132 yards on 21 runs, his second-best game of the season, and left him at 1,072 for the year, the fifth 1,000-yard season of his eight-year career.

Tank Bigsby added a late TD, which led to the two-point scrum, which minimized the late Commanders’ TD, with 1:10 to play.

But how to consider the win?

Glass half full: A good win — on the road, against a division opponent, with no offensive turnovers, but with a defensive turnover. Also, a win having lost linebacker Nakobe Dean, who left early with a hamstring injury. Also, a win with right tackle Lane Johnson and defensive tackle Jalen Carter likely to return for next Sunday’s game at Buffalo.

Glass half empty: Another ugly win — against a poor team, a win despite a skittish $5 million kicker who has missed five of his last 11 kicks; a win in which Hurts continued an inconsistent season; a win in which the coaching staff seemed unprepared with a game plan that seemed uninspired.

A win is a win is a win, but, really, is it too much to expect a greater degree of consistency and professionalism from the reigning Super Bowl champions?

Is it ungrateful to believe a 10-5 team should look more like a 10-win team than five-loss team?

Maybe.

But, hey, we are Philadelphia.

When Jalen Hurts hit A.J. Brown in the end zone with the exclamation point touchdown Sunday, he turned to the Eagles’ sideline and, with unusual enthusiasm, he jumped up and down, waved his arms with emphasis, and said several things that seemed out of character for a young man who usually behaves in such a godly manner.

Maybe he was saying, “Bench me? Bench me?!? That’s ridiculous!”

Probably not. But you couldn’t blame him if he was.

After the game Hurts declined to divulge what he said, or even what he felt, after that, his last play of the game.

“Just a natural reaction,” he offered.

Hurts declined to divulge much of anything, in fact. It is part of his personality: When he plays well after a spate of poor play, he retreats into himself.

“Heavy is the head that wears the crown,” said Brandon Graham, unlikely Shakespeare paraphraser. “Everybody thinks they want it until they get it.”

Hurts was benched in the 2018 College Football Playoff Championship Game, was a second-round draft pick projected as a gadget quarterback, and is routinely maligned for his arm strength and decision-making when things go badly. A three-week slump isn’t going to derail his career.

“Everybody needs to remember where I come from,” he said, “and how I’m built. … [Losses] aren’t barriers. They’re just bumps in the road.”

The high road, in Hurts’ case.

Naturally reticent and having long borne the burdens of doubt, demotion, and disappointment, it is all Hurts can do in these moments to not gloat. Small clues provide the only window into Hurts’ world. Like a master gambler, he has few “tells,” but you can always sense the smoldering passion when, after playing under water, he burst to the surface for air.

It’s how he has survived. It’s how he survived the past week.

“You control your own joy when there’s a lot of noise out there,” coach Nick Sirianni explained.

It was impossible for Hurts to not hear the noise.

Hurts’ seven turnovers and 69.9 passer rating were the most apt and most significant barometers of the three-game losing streak the Eagles rode into Sunday’s snow-frosted walkover contest against the visiting Raiders.

Hurts’ slump raised the question about whether, if he continued to struggle, he should be benched. This, despite having gone to two Pro Bowls and two Super Bowls, the most recent of which he was crowned MVP. Still, playing without stars Lane Johnson on the offensive line and Jalen Carter on the defensive line, the Eagles had slipped from 8-2 to 8-5 and had gone from being the No. 1 seed in the NFC to No. 3, with the Cowboys lurking in the weeds of the NFC East race.

The question in question was posed by the Eagles’ flagship station, WIP 94.1-FM, during its weekly, contracted interview with Sirianni that follows the most recent game. Hurts had five turnovers in the most recent game, a Monday Night Football loss at the Chargers.

Sirianni’s response: “I think that’s ridiculous.”

The question wasn’t ridiculous. It was legitimate.

It sure seems ridiculous now.

Hurts rebounded from the worst game of his career with one of the best. He completed 12 of 15 passes for 175 yards and three touchdowns. Two went to tight end Dallas Goedert, who led the team with six catches for 70 yards. The third went to Brown, only his second official target of the day, a 27-yard dime into triple coverage — by far, Hurts’ best throw of the day.

It was not, however, his best play. That came a few minutes earlier.

Midway through the third quarter, a holding penalty put the ball on the Raiders’ 27 and presented Hurts with third-and-12. At stake: a dagger touchdown or a field goal that would preserve for the Raiders a sliver of hope.

Hurts, in the shotgun formation, saw the middle of the field utterly undefended. He appeared to audible at the line of scrimmage, but later said the play was run as called by offensive coordinator Kevin Patullo. Either way, it was the sort of play that only a handful of quarterbacks can make.

Hurts received the snap, took a half-step backward, tucked the ball, and darted up the middle. He then scooted to his left and outraced defenders to the sideline, exiting the field a yard beyond the first-down marker.

Three plays later, he hit Goedert from 4 yards and the Eagles led, 24-0.

The Brown TD was little more than garnish, but might serve the team well. Brown spent the first half of the season complaining, mostly on social media, that he was being underutilized. He then was targeted 45 times in the next four games, but the offense struggled and the team lost three of four.

On Sunday, Brown was underutilized again, but he did catch the TD pass.

He didn’t speak with the press after the game.

Monitor your insta feed.

At any rate, Hurts thrived in a game that unfolded in the proper design for the team’s composition.

He threw just 15 passes, but none was thrown into harm’s way. None was forced to Brown. Hurts’ 154.9 passer rating was the second-best of his 89 starts, including playoffs. He has not thrown more than 28 passes in any of his top four.

Hurts benefited from an absence of offense from the Raiders, who used backup quarterback Kenny Pickett in place of injured Geno Smith, who’d been piloting the league’s worst scoring offense, at 15.1 points per game. The Eagles’ defense was great, but it was playing a warm-weather dome team in 20-degree weather with 25-mph wind gusts on Pacific Coast time.

Hurts also benefited from a pointed effort to feature running back Saquon Barkley, who ran 22 times for 78 yards and a touchdown. He averaged 14 carries during the losing streak.

Finally, the Eagles incorporated a handful of designed runs, and Hurts ran on his own. His 39 yards on seven rushes were his most since Game 4. He averaged 44.8 rushing yards in the first four games, all of which were wins. The Eagles went 4-5 in the next nine games.

Hurts needs to run. Saquon needs to run. Goedert needs the ball.

If A.J. gets some looks, great. If not, live with it.

“It’s a good formula,” said Brandon Graham, who had two sacks in Game 14 of his 16th season. He’s seen some stuff. “It’s definitely a good formula for us.”

Sirianni understands the formula but wouldn’t commit.

“Next week we could come out and it could be a completely different game,” he said.

Why?

This is how these Eagles can win.

Any other method would be ridiculous.