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Here’s a novel thought:

The refs are actually favoring the Eagles.

After decades of paranoia and conspiracy theories that cast the Birds as victims of perceived favoritism shown to such rivals as the Cowboys, Patriots, and Chiefs, consider what happened for the Eagles on Sunday against the Giants. Honestly, no fan base feels persecuted more than the Eagles’, whose owner, Jeffrey Lurie, is still bitter about the obvious defensive holding call by James Bradberry that cost them a Super Bowl win three years ago.

These days, things are skewing Philly.

The NFL continues to allow the Eagles to run the Tush Push, but that play earned another strike against it when the owners meet next spring.

Assuming a team introduces another proposal to ban the controversial short-yardage play — which has been assailed as an injury risk, which is ridiculous, and has been assailed as a penalty magnet, which is legitimate — Sunday’s debacle will add fuel to whatever fire remains from last spring’s 22-10 vote, which was two ballots shy of a ban.

Facing fourth-and-1 at the Giants’ 11 early in the second quarter, Jalen Hurts and his line surged forward and Hurts peeled off slightly to the left. Floating on a sea of humanity, Hurts clearly never stopped moving toward the line to gain, and as he reached the ball forward, Giants linebacker Kayvon Thibodeaux stripped him of the ball and recovered it.

The play was not reviewable because forward progress is not a reviewable issue.

The larger issue here is that officials don’t seem to be able to consistently rule correctly on a number of areas, among them: whether the defense moves too early; whether the defense lines up in the neutral zone; whether the offensive line moves early; or whether the offense lines up in the neutral zone.

Sunday, they didn’t properly gauge forward progress, even with the runner in plain view.

The final was 38-20, but the call was enormous in the context of the game. Instead of losing the ball to a Giants team that had just completed a 52-yard touchdown drive, the Eagles retained possession and scored a touchdown two plays later to make it 14-7.

It was just the first seven-point swing the officials delivered to the home team.

Early in the fourth quarter, with New York facing fourth-and-11 and trailing by 18, Giants receiver Darius Slayton and Eagles cornerback Quinyon Mitchell engaged in routine hand-fighting during Slayton’s route. Slayton disengaged in a normal fashion, caught the pass, and romped for a 68-yard touchdown.

But no.

Slayton was called for offensive pass interference. Brutal call. In fact, a penalty probably should have been called on Mitchell.

Instead of cutting the lead to 11, the Giants had to punt.

The Eagles are tied for 11th in total penalties called, and they’re seventh in total penalty yards, but most of the calls are inarguable, and, objectively, they seem to be getting away with lots of shenanigans. This was true Sunday.

Yes, the Eagles won by 18, and they dominated all day, but they were gifted that 14-point swing. These two were the kinds of crucial calls that the Eagles and other Chiefs opponents lately have claimed gave unfair advantage to Kansas City; the kinds of calls the Patriots under Bill Belichick seemed to get all the time; and the kinds of calls America’s Team has gotten for 50 years in Dallas.

The Eagles are getting those calls now … right?

The Giants agreed, at least for Sunday. Said Thibodeaux:

“They said they called the forward progress before he reached the ball out. Sounds like some [B.S.] to me.”

Me too.

Seeing red with Goedert

Under Nick Sirianni, the Eagles have never finished outside the top 10 in red-zone efficiency. But with the combination of Sirianni and offensive coordinator Kevin Patullo, who had served as Sirianni’s passing-game coordinator the last four years, the Birds have never been better.

The Eagles are 6-2 in large part because they’ve converted 17 of their 20 trips inside the opponents’ 20-yard line into touchdowns. That’s 85%, which is about 11 percentage points better than the Ravens’ rate last season, which is the best conversion rate by any team over an entire season since Sirianni arrived.

Why are they so efficient?

Because the Eagles have a spectacular offensive line; a strong, fast quarterback; a lethal play in the Tush Push; a superstar running back; two star receivers; and, for my money, the most important red-zone weapon: an elite tight end.

Also: superb play-calling. Example:

On second-and-8 from the Giants’ 17-yard line, Patullo called a run-pass option. Hurts kept it. At the same time, tight end Dallas Goedert swung from the left side of the line to the right, broke upfield, and was wide-open for a touchdown.

So many moving parts worked in perfect synchronization. It was the Eagles’ prettiest play of the season.

“Ultimately, Kevin has to call the plays that he feels give us the best chance to win there,” Sirianni said after the Eagles went 3-for-3 in the red zone on Sunday. “I think we’ve done a good job of being efficient down there, though. … We’ve kept the ball moving forward. Jalen’s played really good football down there, and Dallas has obviously been really good down there.”

Goedert had two touchdown catches in Sunday’s win over the Giants. His seven TD catches are first among tight ends and already are a career high.

“They’ve been letting me get the ball and use my big body,” Goedert said. “We can score in a lot of different ways.”

He certainly can. His 35 touchdowncatches (including playoffs) in about 7½ seasons as an Eagle rank second among franchise tight ends behind Zach Ertz, who caught 40 (including playoffs) in about 8½ seasons.

“He’s a hell of a player,“ Hurts said. ”He’s a big-time target and in a sense, he’s due. He’s due. He does a lot of dirty work in this offense.”

It might be tough to call Goedert’s number with Hurts, running back Saquon Barkley, and receivers A.J. Brown and DeVonta Smith, but the Eagles are winning because Goedert is finding the end zone more than anyone else under Patullo.

“KP has a really good feel in the red zone,” said Hurts.

So does DG.

Mixed emotionals

After being embarrassed by owner Woody Johnson, who said, “If we can just complete a pass, it would look good” after seven weeks of bad quarterback play, Jets quarterback Justin Fields played well Sunday in a comeback win over the Bengals.

Fields had been benched at halftime the week before in favor of Tyrod Taylor, but Taylor’s bruised knee sidelined him Sunday and gave Fields another chance. Fields played well enough to win: 21-for-32, 244 yards, one touchdown. Afterward, during an emotional press availability, he admitted that the pressures of his turbulent career, culminating in Johnson’s criticisms, broke him down.

“This week, I found myself in my closet, crying on the ground, laying down,” Fields said.

As you might assume, Johnson, formerly Donald Trump’s ambassador to the United Kingdom, is not a pleasant bloke. In an annual survey conducted by the players’ association, his 2024 team gave his club the league’s only overall “F,” and his franchise has been a punch line for years.

However, if Johnson’s cruel, candid, but ultimately accurate assessment of the quarterback play worked, well …

Extra points

Shane Steichen, in his third year in Indianapolis, continued his romp to Coach of the Year honors when his Colts beat the Titans and moved to 7-1. Since becoming the Eagles’ OC in 2021, Steichen’s teams have been in the top 10 in rushing, with the Eagles finishing No. 1 in 2021. This year, behind league-leading running back Jonathan Taylor, the Colts rank sixth. … Right behind Steichen in the running for COY: Mike Vrabel, whose Patriots reached 6-2 with a win over the Browns. Second-year quarterback Drake Maye leads the NFL with a 118.7 passer rating. … In that game, Browns defensive lineman Myles Garrett recorded five sacks, bringing him to 10 for the season, tied for the league lead. … Aaron Rodgers failed to join Peyton Manning, Tom Brady, Brett Favre, and Drew Brees as quarterbacks who have beaten all 32 teams when his Steelers lost to the Packers, the team that drafted him. … The Cowboys, with their No. 2-ranked offense and second-to-last defense, lost in Denver and fell to 3-4-1. That means the Eagles are the only team in the NFC East with a winning record — remarkable, since the division was considered one of the best before the season began.

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.