Author: Owen Hewitt

Mike Cordisco is not the first person to compare football to religion, but he might be the first person to spend years photographing Eagles tailgates to make the comparison clearer.

Cordisco’s newest project, Sermon on the Lot, is a 98-page book that compiles photos the Cherry Hill native took at Eagles tailgates between 2018 and 2025.

The goal of the project, Cordisco said, was to push past the typical rowdy image of Eagles fans before a game and show their passion as a kind of religious fervor.

Beyond the project’s title, the book itself is designed to look like something one might find in a church pew, with silver embossing on the front and a midnight green ribbon bookmark.

It also features a sermon written by Philadelphia journalist Dan McQuade, who died last week at 43.

Select photos from Sermon on the Lot will be on display at Unique Photo in Center City. Cordisco, 34, is hosting a gallery opening on Friday from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. and says it will remain in place until mid-March.

Play Ball

Cordisco’s origin story in becoming a photographer is simple. He bought his first camera in 2016 to document his trips to baseball stadiums. It was around the same time he moved within Philadelphia’s city limits for the first time.

Baseball is Cordisco’s “true passion.” He played high school baseball at Cherry Hill West and spent one season on the club team at Rutgers-New Brunswick, where he attended college. He spent a few years working for minor league clubs, working game day operations for the Lehigh Valley IronPigs and selling tickets for the Frisco RoughRiders.

After three years in Texas with the RoughRiders, Cordisco moved to the Bella Vista neighborhood of Philadelphia and got a job as a database administrator with Better Tomorrows, a Camden-based nonprofit.

Cordisco was still making frequent trips to MLB stadiums in an effort to see them all, but grew frustrated with trying to document them on his cell phone camera.

“I was straining, lying on the ground, straining on railings to get these perfect shots on my iPhone,” Cordisco said. “And I was like, ‘You know what, why don’t I just get a camera?’”

Cordisco’s love for photography grew, and eventually he became interested in not just documenting moments, but telling stories with his lens. He collected his baseball photography into a project titled If They Don’t Win It’s a Shame, which “exposes American culture and society within the confines of its national pastime,” according to Cordisco’s website.

“It’s a way to tell all these stories and use my experience in the field, [to] visually tell these stories that I’m interested in,” Cordisco said.

Sacred Sundays

Once Cordisco started to take photography more seriously, he knew he wanted to put together a project that would capture Philadelphia, which he considers to be “the one identifiable U.S. city.”

The city’s sports teams seemed like a natural place to begin framing Philly’s identity. Cordisco did not have personal allegiances to the Philadelphia teams, as his family had roots in New York, but he knew how much Philly cared about its teams from growing up in its suburbs. He began to shoot the places where he saw the city and its teams entwined.

“I was photographing diners that might have Eagles merch in the windows and people’s Phillies and Eagles bumper stickers,” Cordisco said.

He also began photographing the occasional Eagles tailgate. He became captivated by the community that surrounded Lincoln Financial Field on Sundays. By 2022, he had narrowed the project down to focus on tailgating.

“Through the middle of this season, I went to every single one,” Cordisco said. “It was just, for me, the best way to really show and visualize Philly culture.”

Those photos became Sermon on the Lot. Cordisco chose to drape the project in religious metaphors to frame football, and particularly Eagles fandom, as a religion — one with its own set of rituals, traditions, and ways of worship.

“On Sundays, you go to Mass,” Cordisco said. “But in Philly, you go to the parking lot and tailgate an Eagles game.”

Even though the scope of the project changed from its initial aim to portray Philadelphia, Cordisco still feels the city’s identity lies within Sermon on the Lot.

“There’s no way it can’t come through,” Cordisco said. “I think my photos and the work definitely still show that classic grit and character that Philly is known for in the images … It’s still there, even if it’s maybe a layer or two deeper in the work.”

McQuade’s missive

Cordisco was seeking a Philadelphia writer to pen a foreword for his book. He was a frequent reader of McQuade’s work, so Cordisco sent McQuade a cold email in September to see if he would be interested writing something for the project.

“There was nobody else who could have written that,” Cordisco said. “He had no idea who I was, I just e-mailed him one day and he got back to me and said that he would love to do it.”

To fit the project’s religious theming, McQuade’s foreword takes the form of a sermon. It is about the two men who showed up to former Eagles owner Leonard Tose’s house after news broke that Tose had agreed to sell a portion of the team and move it to Phoenix in 1984.

The two men, Barry Martin and Robert Vandetty, left Tose a note asking the owner to reconsider, as McQuade detailed in a 2023 story for Defector. Martin and Vandetty’s note closed with a simple phrase: “Go Birds — Philadelphia Birds.”

“‘Go Birds’ is your greeting, your mantra, your rallying cry,” an excerpt of McQuade’s sermon reads. “The Eagles trademarked it, but it does not belong to them. It is yours. Think of Barry and Rob. They risked arrest to say ‘Go Birds.’ When you go forth today, I beseech you to say it too.“

Cordisco said McQuade went “above and beyond” in his involvement with the project, offering ideas on how to display the work at the Unique Photo gallery showing. McQuade’s words will hang alongside Cordisco’s photos on the walls of the Center City photo store.

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Cordisco started Sermon on the Mount more interested in how the Eagles reflected Philadelphia than the team itself. But now, thanks to the community he found in the parking lots, he considers himself a Birds convert.

“I went out to the tailgates and just saw how much it truly meant to people,” Cordisco said. “Not even just the wins and losses, but just being there. I talked to people that have been tailgating in the same RV for 40 years now, and they would tell me all these stories about how they raised their kids at the tailgates.

“Making that connection with so many people only strengthened my fandom of the Eagles.”