Four years ago, the Eagles went into Super Bowl LII as underdogs. Carson Wentz had been out with a torn anterior cruciate ligament since a week 14 victory over the Los Angeles Rams. Nick Foles had held down the fort, but the team was going into battle against the greatest quarterback of all-time. Sixty game minutes later, the Philadelphia Eagles were Champions of the National Football League, leaving Tom Brady bereft on the turf, the only team who had defeated a team he quarterbacked in the Super Bowl not named the New York Giants.
The entire face of the league has changed since then. Brady no longer plays for the New England Patriots, although it seems like his 44-year-old ass seems no closer to retirement than it did the first time his team played the Eagles in the Super Bowl in 2005. Neither Wentz nor Foles are Eagles either. Foles is a third-stringer for the Chicago Bears right now, whose season ended in tatters with their coach and general manager fired. Wentz singlehandedly kept the Indianapolis Colts out of the playoffs with two sloppy games to end the season after a battle with COVID-19.
The Eagles changed coaches, changed quarterbacks, and changed fortunes. What looked like a burgeoning dynasty turned into a leaky ship that required a complete overhaul in the most recent offseason. They weren’t supposed to be in the playoffs this year, but first-year head coach Nick Sirianni, nascent starting quarterback Jalen Hurts, and a ragtag band of the best team a diminished salary cap thanks to Wentz’s contract demands kept by the team after trading him could buy led by the nastiest offensive line in the league have scraped into the postseason tournament after a one-year absence. The recent expansion to the NFL postseason allowed them to take the seventh seed, a position that had not existed before last year. For their troubles, they will play the defending champion Tampa Bay Buccaneers, led by, who else, Tom Brady.
The circumstances are much different than in Super Bowl LII. That Eagles team was complete, a team stocked at nearly every position, built to go toe-to-toe with any team in the league that year, even the Patriots. This Eagles team is thick at some positions and threadbare at others. They’ve gotten by on coaching, excellent play from their marquee starters like Darius Slay, Jason Kelce, Josh Sweat, and Devonta Smith, and the luck to have a last-place schedule. Granted, you can only play the teams the league puts in front of you, but it’s also not like they were squeaking by these moribund teams. Consider that they pummeled the Detroit Lions and the New Orleans Saints (who finished a hair out of playoff position) and the New York Jets and the Atlanta Falcons and the Denver Broncos. Division games can be hairy, but they were able to blow out the Giants and the Washington Football Team once apiece. Their luck in one-score games has been atrocious. In fact, if each result of every one-score game the Eagles were involved in were reversed, they’d have finished 11-6, assuming the week 18 game between them and the Cowboys where the Cowboys starters played the Eagles second- and third-stringers, stayed the same. Now, some of those games, the Eagles went down big to better teams and came back. My retort to that is that maybe those better teams shouldn’t have taken their feet off the gas, but results are results.
Still, their ability not to say die has been impressive in a year where people expected them to continue tanking while scoreboard-watching to see if the Dolphins and Colts were also tanking horribly. Many are expecting that ability itself to die Sunday at 1 PM, and if you’re not a psychotic Eagles homer like I am, I would expect you also to expect the ride to end here. Again, the Eagles are scrappy with elite talent at some spots, but they’re not nearly as deep a team as the Buccaneers are. The Bucs are one of only two teams in the league to allow fewer quarterback hurries/hits than the Eagles did this year. They have better pass rushers, better linebackers, and a better quarterback. Bruce Arians has been to the dance before with one Super Bowl title under his belt and playoff experience in Arizona before coming to the Bucs. This isn’t a clash of the titans where one team is slightly inconvenienced starting a backup quarterback who ended up playing as good or better than the starter he replaced. This is the 1992 Dream Team vs. Brazil or Croatia. The latter two teams belonged on an Olympic court, but that Dream Team was too much for them.
However, there’s a part of me that doesn’t believe this is going the way of the chalk. Could this be David and Goliath brewing, where the undermanned Eagles shock the world against the defending champs? Indulge me if you will as I make the case for an upset. The Tampa Bay Buccaneers overwhelmed teams last year on offense with a stiff defense that got to the quarterback. This year, it was more of the same until the shoes started dropping. Brady had offensive weapons until he didn’t. Chris Godwin, standing on the precipice of getting PAID this offseason, tore his ACL. Antonio Brown had issues with the way the Bucs ran as a team and the way the NFL ran as a league, so he’s off the roster. Leonard Fournette has hamstring issues, and even if he’s back Sunday, there’s no guarantee he’s going to be fully healed. Mike Evans plays in a perpetual state of being banged up, and Rob Gronkowski might have pudding where his brain should be. Relatively, the Eagles defense matches up better against the Bucs offense Sunday than they did when they met in the regular season solely because of a gradient in health. Furthermore, the Bucs defense has been riddled with injuries all year to the point where they were running guys off the street to play in their defensive backfield.
The Eagles offense has also advanced far beyond where it was that first meeting. People say you can’t run on the Bucs, and that might be true. Vita Vea plays like an Imperial Star Destroyer scours nearspace for the Galactic Empire. He’s a throwback run-stuffer in a league where that sort of player isn’t necessarily needed anymore. However, what offensive line in this league is built to run the ball like the Eagles? The Titans and the 49ers are the only other teams I can think of, and the Bucs didn’t play either one of them. The first game, Sirianni ran the ball a total of nine times that game. Also, Landon Dickerson hadn’t started to come on, and Lane Johnson was still out recovering from his mental health issues. The Eagles weren’t supposed to be able to run the ball on the Saints either. They ran it 50 times for 242 yards. Hurts also hadn’t found his touch at this point either. That week six game felt like it was three seasons ago.
Still, a lot has to go right for the Eagles to win Sunday. I’m not here to tell you that it won’t go right. I know the odds aren’t really against them. Shaq Barrett gave the pass blocking fits week six, and even though he’ll probably face either Jordan Mailata or Johnson rather than Andre Dillard, he’ll give them all they can handle. Gimpy Mike Evans is still better than every Eagles receiver right now. Only Smith, who set the franchise record for rookie receiving yards Saturday, has a higher ceiling in a few years. And Tom Brady is still Tom Brady. If he’s got the ball in his hands with two minutes left down one score, you can guarantee that he’ll drive down the field and put the dagger in your heart.
Except for that one time he didn’t, of course.
People love the Philly Special, and why not? When gadget plays work, they are fun to watch, even if you have no vested interest in the game. However, the most important play in that game, perhaps in the entirety of the history of the franchise, was Brandon Graham’s strip sack of Brady late in the fourth quarter. Everyone’s seen that play out differently before. Colts fans, Falcons fans, Broncos fans, Steelers fans, Panthers fans, every fan of every other team in the AFC East. Brady, with the ball in his hands, drives down the field and puts the Patriots up giving Foles and company little time to answer. But plays where Graham gets a free run at the quarterback enough to strip him don’t come along all that often when the guy with the ball is some nerd like Andy Dalton or Ryan Tannehill. When it’s Tom Fucking Brady, the script never calls for him to get put on his ass and the ball on the turf for a guy on the other team to pick up.
Eagles fans before the game believed something like that could happen, and it happened over and over and over again. It happened when Foles hit a frozen rope to Alshon Jeffery for the first touchdown of the game. It happened when the Pats tried running their own trick play before the Philly Special and their thrower missed Brady by a country yard. It happened when Foles zipped a laser into Corey Clement’s hands, and it happened when Zach Ertz rumbled into the end zone on a catch and run for their last touchdown. And yes, it happened when Doug Pederson asked if Foles wanted the Philly Philly, and it happened when Graham left Brady bereft on the turf. We believed, and they provided.
I don’t know if they’ll provide again Sunday. However, it’s not my domain to worry that they won’t. I have to believe they’ll do it until they don’t. It sounds silly, of course, but the entire enterprise of sports fandom is silly as hell. What kind of grown-ass man who helps provide for his family or himself in this day and age gets in their feelings about rich dudes playing a game? It’s illogical, but we sit in front of our TVs every Sunday, or every day there’s a game in basketball arenas or on pitches in jolly ol’ England feeling vicarious pain and joy with thousands of our closest strangers. If we didn’t believe, there’d be no point. Honestly, after the year the Eagles have had, I’m not ready to call it a pointless endeavor either.