As I said last week, it’s pretty clear that the Eagles are now America’s Team.
To reiterate: I am not a Patriot-hater. Far from it. I admire the franchise and am utterly fascinated by the Belichick-Adams axis. I mean, this is a team that went out and poached a kid from Silicon Valley and installed him as a “senior software engineer.” What does a football team do with an computer engineer? I promise you, he’s not updating the office network and working on Patriots.com.
No, from the best available evidence—which isn’t much—this kid is doing something with regard to scouting and Big Data and whatever it is, it’s probably awesome.
So no, I’m not anti-Patriots. I always derive a large amount of pleasure from watching them hack the league.
But at a certain point you realize that rooting for the Patriots—actually pulling for them, as opposed to appreciating what they do—is like rooting for Google. I mean, you can do it, I guess. But why would you?
And this year’s Eagles team hails from the opposite pole. They’re coached by a guy nobody wanted, with a quarterback nobody wanted. And their “secret-sauce” is blocking and tackling. No, really.
When you watch this Eagles squad, what jumps out at you is how solid they are fundamentally. On defense, their guys are always flying to the ball. Other offenses don’t get many extra yards because the Birds almost always make their first-level tackles. They’re never out of position. They don’t lose receivers in coverage. And they hustle like you wouldn’t believe.When they crushed the Vikings, the Eagles defense picked off a pass in the first half and returned it for a touchdown. Have a look at how quickly the defenders converted to blockers. Those guys flipped a switch and came hustling downfield at warp speed. That’s heads-up play.
And on offense, they’re more or less the same, only replace “tackling” with “blocking.” The Eagles are masters of turning what should be short-gains into 4 or 6 yard runs, because they get not just the lead block, but the secondary block to open up an extra yard or two. Which in turn opens up the passing game so that Foles can do his thing where he makes good decisions and then bombs away.
So my Eagles aren’t giving you the GOAT quarterback or supermodels or the evil genius coach or a secret plan to dominate professional football for a generation. They’re just giving you great football from a bunch of lunch-bucket players.
Also, they’re going to lose.
Just so we’re clear: I harbor no illusions about the Super Bowl. I am not a child.
This New England team is better than the Birds. Better by a fair amount when they’re healthy and still better by a little bit with a lacerated Hand of God and a gonked-out Gronk-out. (Serious question: What sort of verbal concussion test could you give Gronkowski that would be dispositive? I ask from a place of love.)
The Patriots aren’t a stone-cold, mortal lock. But my guess is that if they played this Super Bowl ten times, New England wins six or seven of the games.
But then there’s the question of Natural Law.
The Eagles have never won a Super Bowl. You could choose to believe that this is random chance, the distribution curve of an event with 52 instances and 32 teams. Or you could choose to believe that there is cosmic justice at play, that Philadelphia has been denied a championship for a reason.
I vote for the latter.
Remember the show Cheers? As Joss Whedon is fond of explaining, the audience for Cheers always wanted Sam and Diane to get together. But they needed Sam and Diane to stay apart. The tension is what gave the show meaning.
There might be something like that with Philly and Eagles. We want them to win a Super Bowl. Dear Lord, do we want them to win. But maybe we need them not to. Maybe winning a Super Bowl would just turn us into Pittsburgh or New York or some other fanbase that’s “passionate” but doesn’t carry around Philadelphia’s level of foundational angst about the duality of human nature revealed in sport, about the exquisite tension between being and becoming.
Or at least that’s the story I’m telling myself this week.
