It was just 17 days ago that the Eagles lost for the second straight time, lost to the New York Giants by 17 points at MetLife Stadium, lost in so humiliating a fashion that their All-Pro right tackle called out the play-calling as predictable and their star wide receiver admitted that with more than 11 minutes left in the game he had already resigned himself to defeat. It was bad.
Two seasons before, it had been worse. Two seasons before, the Eagles had lost back-to-back games to the San Francisco 49ers and the Dallas Cowboys, and those pathetic performances triggered the kind of midseason change that reveals a franchise’s leadership has started to panic. The defensive coordinator was demoted. A Bill Belichick acolyte was promoted. And what began as a pebble rolling down a hill turned into an avalanche: six losses in seven games, a head coach whose job was in jeopardy, a collapse whose psychological residue remained on this team for a long time.
Maybe, after their 38-20 victory Sunday in their rematch against the Giants, the Eagles can assure everyone that they’ve scraped away the last of that sticky stuff from 2023. Their Super Bowl win in February took care of most of it, but burping up that late lead against the Denver Broncos on Oct. 5 and getting manhandled by Jaxson Dart and Cam Skattebo four days later brought up all those bad memories again. The Eagles were 4-2 but reeling, still formidable but vulnerable, and it was fair to wonder whether they could straighten themselves out over their two games before their bye week.
They did. They won a challenging road game against the Minnesota Vikings, then handled an inferior opponent Sunday. Now they enter their 15-day break with a 6-2 record, with a stranglehold on the NFC East, and — despite several injuries to key players, despite the ever-present mist of controversy around A.J. Brown — without the worry that their season was spiraling out of control.
“I don’t think from an inside perspective there was ever any like, ‘Oh man, this is like ’23,’” coach Nick Sirianni said. “You know what I mean? But were there lessons learned in ’23? Absolutely. We continue to try to learn lessons from ’24 and ’25.
“I always like our process off of a bye week and during a bye week. That’s my job as a coach. We’ve still got a lot of things to fix and clean up, but that’s what this week will be about: the players resting, looking at stuff themselves, and then us really grinding it out this week to put ourselves in a position to move on through the rest of the season.”
It would be easy to argue that the Eagles are mentally tougher now than they were then; that they have a more talented, more cohesive collection of players; that Sirianni is a better head coach with a better coaching staff; that Jalen Hurts is a better quarterback. All those assertions are true, but they can feel intangible and opaque. The explanations for why a team regresses (as the Eagles did late in the 2023 season), improves (as they did in 2024), or stabilizes itself (as they’ve done over their last two games) often come down to the schematic and tactical adjustments that the team tries to make. They come down to concrete changes in the way the team does things.
Take one example that went awry. When the Eagles decided in December ‘23 that they needed a new defensive coordinator, when they replaced Sean Desai with Matt Patricia, they failed to take a vital factor into consideration. Patricia’s defensive scheme was a lot of things, but simple wasn’t one of them, and there was little chance that the players would learn it well enough in time to thrive within it.
“I still remember we used to come in here before games, and he’d have an entire greaseboard — it looked like a 15-foot-long greaseboard — and the entire thing was written up with all the calls,” Eagles center Brett Toth said after Sunday’s game. “And to see that, it’s like, ‘Wow.’ That’s tough on anyone to try to switch to midseason.
“It’s a very hybrid defense. Anything with the Patriots is going to be very complex, high-IQ stuff. To have to learn and install that in the middle of the season, it’s a huge ask. This is chess. Football is 11-man chess.”
Now take another, more recent, more successful example: the Eagles’ use, at long last, of under-center snaps and play-action passes. There’s no getting around the fact that their offense has been more dynamic overall — and their running game back to its old dominant self against the Giants — partially because putting Hurts under center allows Kevin Patullo to call a wider variety of plays. They didn’t have to rewrite the playbook. A new wrinkle was all they needed.
“It’s not necessarily that you stick a guy under the center or you’re playing from the shotgun or you’re in a pistol,” said Hurts, who over his last two games has completed 34 of his 43 passes for 505 yards and seven touchdowns. “It’s about what you’re doing when you’re under center, how we’re leveraging what we do, how we’re leveraging the guys, what spots are we putting guys in when we’re in these different positions. We just want to continue to build off it.”
Seventeen days ago, the idea that the Eagles would be building off anything heading into their bye seemed tenuous at best. The defending champs had staggered. The Giants had embarrassed them. And the memory of that awful ending to 2023 was fresh again. Now? It seems deeper in the distance, and they have a chance to make sure it stays there.
