In the immortal words of Comrade Xu, "There's no need to overcomplicate things." In discussing how the Philadelphia Phillies failed to beat the Los Angeles Thanos, that simple sentence explained in near-totality how stuff typically happens to and for people and teams. It's just sports, and in sports stuff happens.
But—and surely you knew a "but" was coming, because why else do blogs exist—sometimes complicating things in the most drug-aided and byzantine ways is exactly what the moment requires. Especially in football, where the sport must make 17 games feel like 166 (the Phillies' final total) or 169 and counting (the Cubs'). For that math to work, some complication is required. In rare cases this requires a near religious experience, but a Thursday night loss to the New York Giants will suffice in a pinch.
With that as preamble: WTF, the Eagles? On an unusually Philly-centric sports night—yeah, yeah, you touchy bastards think every night is a Philly-centric night around here—the agonies of Orion Kerkering will eventually fade, but the next 10 days will be about how the defending Super Bowl champions could have gone to irretrievably Jets-level dung so quickly. Yes, these are exaggerations of the actual situation here, which amounts to an extremely talented team playing confused and counterproductive football in general and getting whomped by the Giants in particular. But the easy part for Philadelphians is tarting up an apocalypse; the complexity lies in the explanations, justifications, and blame delegation.
Having given its citizens a drunken championship parade (is there any other kind?) eight months ago, the Eagles have just completed their too-cool-for-school phase, and are now posing as the worst 4-2 team in NFL history. Just ask their fans: They'll tell you as much right before that knee hits your stomach. The defending champs have struggled to four uninspiring wins by a total of 20 points, blown a two-touchdown lead at home against Denver, and in the apogee of disgrace, lost convincingly against the lava flow of indigestible failure that is the New York Giants. Bad losses happen even to good teams, but the shirtless postgame hooting of future Love Island cast member Cam Skattebo is no less irritating for that.
This would all be standard Eagles behavior if not for the fact that they were geniuses a mere year ago. Saquon Barkley averaged a touchdown per carry. Jalen Hurts was the future of quarterbacking. Howie Roseman was the man who stole Stephen Hawking's brain and taught it to draft. Vic Fangio was all the greatest defensive coordinators in history crammed into one head. The tush push was the most successful reach-back into the 1930s in the history of anything. Jeffrey Lurie was slightly less smarmy than your average owner, which while not saying much is still not nothing. Nick Sirianni was ... well, let’s not push our luck, but he did keep winning games, even in the next calendar year.
And somehow it has all gone to shit, provided you can define shit as a .667 winning percentage; all Philly sports fans are eminently capable of that. Barkley is averaging 3.4 yards per carry and has fewer total yards than Tony Pollard, who currently plays for Albania's Team, the Tennessee Titans. Hurts has been sacked more times than anyone other than Cam Ward, who also plays for the Titans. Roseman is just another suit. The tush push is the only play in the book that is still useful, although watching it four times in succession in the Eagles' last scoring drive loses its magic in the same way that the 1926 Frankford Yellow Jackets championship highlight kinescope tends to fade after the first couple of sepia-tinged minutes. We won't bother with Lurie, because he didn't flip off any Giants fans. Fangio's defense is still statistically excellent, although giving up 34 to the Giants after giving up 18 points in the last quarter against Denver is hardly a winning advertisement. A.J. Brown and DeVonta Smith have two more receptions between them than Puka Nacua has by himself.
This leaves us with Sirianni, or more precisely the question of why Sirianni would be fired and tossed down a well by local plebiscite despite having been the coach for two of the last three Super Bowls and having a better career winning percentage than everyone but John Madden, George Halas, George Allen, and the guy who coached those Yellow Jackets.
The fun, if fun is the right word, is in figuring out how it has all gone brown, starting with "But how could being 4-2 actually be bad?" Why is Hurts suddenly Tua Tagovailoa? How did the league figure out Barkley, and conversely, when did Satan call in all those 2024 chits? How much longer can Brown and Smith be kept as anonymous as their surnames in the Eagles attack? Is Roseman now an idiot for not firing Sirianni right after the parade rather than waiting until the next time Sirianni calls the fans and media idiots? Why, or how, is this team boring most of us and enraging its most ardent supporters?
In a season with 18 games and 105 off-days, the talk necessarily overwhelms the events; in Philly, where the navel-gazing is just a precursor to the bottle upside the head, the complications grow exponentially as a result, if only because the crackpot theories adhere to the sensible ones in a gigantic braid of "We Suck And Here's Why." Yes, Eagles fans are angry the team isn't 7-0 after six games, but also THEY LOST TO THE GIANTS AND SCORED FEWER POINTS AS A TEAM THAN AN INFLATABLE CHILDREN'S PLAYHOUSE NAMED "CAM SKATTEBO."
The Phillies losing to the Dodgers is at least explicable, if weird in the facts of how it happened. But the New York Giants are barely the Los Angeles Angels, let alone the Dodgers, and the Eagles are the defending champions. With 10 days to seethe over this before a tense game in Minnesota, the town’s sports culture is a threat to self-immolate in ways that Kerkering couldn’t have delivered if he'd collected Andy Pages' roller off the bat and eaten it. Sometimes you don't want the elegance of simplicity or the cool comfort of perspective as much as you want to just make up some incoherent gibberish so that the slobs nearby at the bar will buy you a beer and toss off their own theories as to why Cal Adomitis is the worst long snapper in the league. To modify the famous line from the glorious Scoop Nisker, if you don't like the reason for the news, go out and make some of your own. Down on the Schuylkill, they are already hard at work.
