The Philadelphia Eagles has never seen anything nearly….
The NFL has never seen anything nearly like the Eagles’ rapid fall.
The NFL has traditionally been referred to as “Not For Long.” Change happens rapidly in a copycat league where effective ideas are investigated, evaluated, and mimicked, and ongoing innovation is critical to long-term success. Even by that metric, it’s tough to recall a more dramatic fall from grace than the Philadelphia Eagles’ during the last two months.
As recently as seven weeks ago, the Eagles were the envy of the league, a winning machine led by an eager young coach, a rising franchise quarterback, and one of football’s most talented teams from top to bottom. After winning the NFC title previous year and falling three points short of winning the Super Bowl, they had surged out to the NFL’s best record.
But after a 10-1 start, the Eagles faltered and entered Monday night’s NFC wildcard playoff having lost five of six games, including blowout defeats to the 3-12 Cardinals and 5-11 Giants. All of it came to a merciful, predictable end on a muggy Monday night at Raymond James Stadium, where they were dog-walked 32-9 by a mediocre Tampa Bay team they’d dominated in October – a horror-show scoreline that could have been far worse if the Buccaneers’ error-prone offense hadn’t dropped about a dozen passes. The Eagles could not block. They couldn’t catch. They clearly could not tackle. They were unprepared, uninspired, and disinterested. In a critical moment loaded with clear metaphor, the Tush Push – their signature short-yardage move once praised as irresistible
The Eagles have had their share of home-stretch collapses in a nine-decade history filled with far more heartbreak than glory – 2014 under Chip Kelly, 1994 under Rich Kotite, 1981 under Dick Vermeil, and 1961 under Nick Skorich – but none of those collapses can compare to the past seven weeks’ warp-speed regression. This year’s squad became only the second in NFL history to lose 12 games after a 10-1 start, following the 1986 New York Jets. Even though they were in free fall, the Jets managed to win a playoff game. Not the Eagles, who suffered their second-worst postseason defeat ever against a bottom-10 offense led by a journeyman quarterback.
Two months ago, it would have been unthinkable for the Eagles to part ways with Nick Sirianni, the 42-year-old wunderkind who had collected the highest win-loss % of any current NFL head coach in two and a half seasons and seemed to be on the verge of a lucrative contract extension. After the most catastrophic in-season collapse in NFL history, it’s virtually impossible to fathom an alternative.
So, what happened? Let us start with the obvious. Following last year’s Super Bowl success, both of Philadelphia’s coordinators were poached for head coaching positions: OC Shane Steichen to the Indianapolis Colts, DC. Jonathan Gannon is joining the Arizona Cardinals. Brian Johnson and Sean Desai replaced those openings, and it was obvious that the replacements were in over their
Hurts, the MVP runner-up last year who played with a dislocated finger on Monday night, hurt his knee in October and never fully healed. Johnson’s inexplicable unwillingness to run the ball remained throughout the season, despite an offensive line loaded with future Hall of Famers and a Pro Bowl-caliber running back in D’Andre Swift.
In summary, they had major issues. And when it came time to remedy them, the coaching staff had no idea what to do. When the participants realized this, the game was ended.
None of these can immediately explain Philadelphia’s strong start to 2023. And it’s true: the Eagles stormed to the NFL’s best record during Thanksgiving weekend and the inside track on the No. 1 seed, adding up
The Eagles, like the champion prizefighter who is never the same after his first knockout loss, lost something that day that they could never regain. San Francisco lay up a template, but the coaching staff’s failure to respond made it far too simple for future opponents to follow. (The Eagles’ failure to plan a blitz reaction for two months, for example, demonstrates stupidity rarely seen in the NFL.) They were thrashed the next week in Dallas and only went downhill from there, their once-stout defense regressing into a jumble of failed assignments, busted coverages, and missed tackles. In a desperate move, Sirianni replaced Desai as defensive coordinator with Matt Patricia, a retread whose only claim to fame, definitely in Philadelphia, was
There’s plenty of fault to go around. Some may wonder how the team’s players’ leadership was so poor that this outcome could occur. Others may argue that the coaches offered the players little opportunity to win. In either case, Philadelphia’s startling collapse is a squandered chance that will haunt this football-crazed city for years.
The obvious response is to clean the house. The whole coaching staff must go, with the exception of offensive line coach Jeff Stoutland and special teams coordinator Michael Clay, whose once-shaky unit improved significantly since 2022.
Sirianni’s situation may not be so straightforward. His win-loss record remains the greatest in club history, even after accounting for this year’s calamity. No other Eagles coach has ever achieved the
