The biggest risk to the Eagles right now is overcorrection. There’s an alternate history to their 2023 collapse that they should consider before making any drastic changes.
The setup is mostly the same as the one we all know well. A team fresh off a Super Bowl berth arrives in November looking like a good bet to again win its conference. But after a 7-2 start, the hubcaps start to rattle. The team loses four of the next six games, failing to crack 20 points in all four. Questions begin to swirl about its first-year offensive coordinator. The head coach stands by his man. The team finishes the regular season 11-6 and will likely need to win two games on the road in order to get back to the Super Bowl.
In truth, this isn’t an alternate history at all. It’s the actual history of the 2023 Chiefs. The drop-off from the season before was massive on the offensive side of the football. Kansas City scored 125 fewer points in 2023 than it did in 2022, when it beat the Eagles in the Super Bowl. The Chiefs’ average yards per play fell from 6.43 to 5.54. And it really hasn’t rebounded. Since the start of the 2023 regular season, the Chiefs have averaged 23.1 points and 348.7 yards per game, down from 28.7 and 405.2 in 2021-22.
But the Chiefs won the Super Bowl in 2023 despite entering the playoffs having lost four of their last eight to finish 11-6. They beat the Bills and Ravens on the road, thanks in large part to a late missed field goal in Buffalo and two fourth-quarter turnovers inside the Chiefs 25-yard line by Baltimore.
Are there lessons for the Eagles to draw here? I don’t know. Lessons probably isn’t the right word. I’m not going to sit here and argue that people are overreacting to the mess that they’ve seen from Jalen Hurts, Kevin Patullo and Co., most acutely over the last three weeks. But I do think it can be detrimental if we fail to consider the Eagles’ struggles within the appropriate context.
Walking around the locker room after the Eagles’ 24-15 loss to the Bears on Black Friday, I heard several players use the same phrase.
Center Cam Jurgens: “We’re 8-4. The sky’s still above us.”
Running back Saquon Barkley: “The sky’s falling outside the locker room, but I have nothing but the utmost confidence in the men in this locker room, players and coaches included.”
The remainder of the season will be determined by whether the Eagles can internalize all of this talk. They are correct when they say that the situation inside the locker room is not nearly as dire as the angst that abounds outside those walls. They still have three games remaining against the Raiders and the Commanders. That should get them to 11 wins, bare minimum. That would leave the Cowboys needing to win out in order to steal the division from them. The Eagles will tell you that they aren’t thinking about these things. Such is the NFL’s this-game-is-the-only-game ethos. But, sometimes, it can be helpful to take a little peek down the road, if only to remind yourself that you aren’t standing on the edge of a cliff.
The Eagles play in an environment that can make it awfully tough to maintain perspective. The Birds are an all-consuming thing here. Questions, headlines, boos, all of them multiply. There comes a point when any human being will stop and wonder whether everybody else is right.
There is a long list of reasons why it makes little sense to compare the Eagles’ current straits to the ones that led to the 2023 collapse. The one similarity is the way the chicken can become the egg and snowball into a big scrambled mess. The prime mover of the Eagles’ dysfunction that season wasn’t Hurts or Brian Johnson or Nick Sirianni or some chemical imbalance within the locker room. It was a defense that couldn’t get a stop, a defense that was of a wildly different makeup than it is right now.
It’s funny to look back to the numbers from that season. The Eagles’ NFL rankings in yards and points in 2023 were exactly what they were in 2024: seventh in points, eighth in yards. They scored 31 points in a loss to the Cardinals down the stretch in 2023.
The worst thing the Eagles can do is hold on to any sort of thought that the foundation of their collapse in 2023 lies within themselves. The dysfunction grew from the on-field struggles, not vice versa. Yes, that dysfunction eventually reached a point when it became self-fulfilling. But the Eagles allowed it to get to that point. The Chiefs of 2023 did not.
The reality of the NFL is that good teams struggle. It is a counterpunchers league, led by a bunch of maniac coaches who won’t rest until they figure out what you are doing and how to beat it. Andy Reid did not suddenly become a worse offensive coach over the last three seasons. Patrick Mahomes is still the same Patrick Mahomes who threw for 5,250 yards in 2022. Nobody in Kansas City or elsewhere is seriously questioning whether one of them is the problem.
The Eagles made it look easy last year. But last year was an anomaly. The competitive environment this season is much closer to the norm. The Eagles are still one of the two teams in the NFC most capable of making the Super Bowl. In the Rams, they have already beaten the one team that looks better than everybody else.
The message that Sirianni and his team have been preaching is the right one. They just need to keep believing it.
