Five Reasons the Philadelphia Eagles Are America’s Team Now

1) The Eagles are blue-collar workmen. The Patriots have the greatest quarterback in the history of the game, a guy who’s better looking than George Clooney and is married to the world’s most famous supermodel. They have the greatest coach in the history of the game, a guy who’s an evil genius bent on hacking the league for every conceivable advantage. (Seriously: In 18 years with the Patriots, Belichick has used left-footed punters almost exclusively. That doesn’t happen by accident.)

They have their own in-house skunkworks run by a monastic genius who’s obsessed with high-level math, reports only to Bill Belichick, and has no public job description beyond “director of football research.” And they have another genius who (we think) runs their scouting department. He had been about to take a job with Google when Belichick poached him and gave him the title “senior software engineer.”

All of which is to say that the Patriots are the NFL equivalent of a James Bond villain—good looking, rich, stocked with next-gen technology and mysterious henchmen, and bent on world domination.

The Eagles, on the other hand, are a bunch of normal, workaday guys. They’ve gotten to the Super Bowl by blocking and tackling. Watch them play and what jumps out at you most is how they almost never miss first-level tackles. Teams don’t pick up extra yards on their defense. They make good decisions in every phase of the game. The offensive linemen make the blocks that turn 3-yard runs into 5-yard runs. They manage the clock well. They play within themselves. That’s it.

Which, to be honest, is how most of us get through life.

2) Nick Foles is us. Anyone who has ever gotten hosed at their job by a crazy, incompetent boss can sympathize with the Eagles quarterback. Foles was drafted in the second round to be a backup to Michael Vick. In his sophomore season, Vick went down with an injury and Foles took over the starting job, where he promptly threw 27 touchdown passes with only two interceptions, breaking Tom Brady’s then-record for efficiency while earning a slot in the Pro Bowl and leading the Eagles to the playoffs. The Eagles head coach, Chip Kelly, claimed that Foles would be his starting quarterback “for the next thousand years.”

A year later, Kelly traded Foles to the Rams for Sam Bradford, because he—Kelly, not Foles—is psychotic. Follow along with what happened next:

Foles went to Rams, where he had to play for another psychotic coach, Jeff Fisher. Fisher then decided to give the starting job to another young QB, Case Keenum. After acquiring these two viable quarterbacks, Fisher went and drafted another QB (Jared Goff) to replace them both. Foles was released.

Last March, after departing from the Rams, Foles thought about quitting football. Instead, he signed a short-term deal in Philadelphia, where there was a new coach and a new Next Big Thing quarterback. Foles was pushed to the back of the line again.

But when Carson Wentz blew out his ACL late in the season, Foles took over, guided the team down the stretch, and led them to the Super Bowl. In the NFC championship game (against fellow Jeff Fisher-survivor Keenum, coincidentally), he went 26 of 33 for 352 yards with 3 touchdowns, no interceptions, and a QB rating of 141.4.

And he’s still considered the backup.

What does this guy have to do to get the respect he’s earned on the field?

If you’ve ever gotten a raw deal at the office—if you’ve ever worked for a bad boss who seemed hell-bent on hurting your career for no discernible reason—then Nick Foles is your spirit animal.

3) Tony from Manayunk > Tommy from Quinzee. By now, everyone who follows football has their own Tommy from Quinzee (or, depending on your neighborhood, Sully from Southie). He’s the drunken Pats fan who won’t shut up about Larry Bird and Wes Welkah and the greatest fahkin’ quahtah-back to evah play the game.

Tommy, in his natural habitat. (Getty Images)

For a while, we all laughed at Tommy. He was droll and kind of adorable, in his own way. But by the third Super Bowl win the Tommys of the world were getting a little obnoxious. By the fifth, they were fahkin’ insufferable.

On the other hand, mainstream America is only just getting acquainted with the prototypical Eagles fan, guys like Tony from Manayunk. The first glimpse came Sunday morning when people noticed that city workers in downtown Philadelphia were lubing up light poles with Crisco, in an attempt to keep Eagles fans from scaling them after the game.

It didn’t work.

That was just the start of the celebrating for Eagles fans. Check out the guy in the Dawkins jersey trying to catch the train:

Now sure, this is a bunch of people who are rough around the edges. You still get the occasional guy arrested for punching a police horse. Or this.

Jeff ‘Buckets’ Fisher displays the Aristotelian virtues of sport during a beer drinking contest at Lincoln Financial Field before the NFC championship game on January 21, 2018. (Corey Perrine/Getty Images)

But on the whole, it’s a pretty lovable group of fans who seem weird only because they still care about sports in a way that the rest of “civilized” America no longer does. For Philly fans, the Eagles aren’t just another piece of #content, like Netflix or Candy Crush.

No, the team is an example of the Aristotelian virtues we find in sport. The Eagles are the embodiment of the human condition, in both its tragedy and its glory.

Which is why sometimes you have to drive a jeep up the art museum’s steps.

4) The Eagles are the most disrespected underdog in the history of sports. Have you ever felt like people were counting you out for no reason? Not giving you any credit for your accomplishments? Well try this on for size: The Eagles were tied for the best record in football this year, but without Wentz they were underdogs in both of their playoff games. They didn’t just win: They fought off a string of freakish mishaps to eliminate the defending NFC champs last week and then blew the doors off of the Vikings in a game that was over midway through the third quarter.

Tom Brady has a massive laceration on his throwing hand, which clearly hurt his play, and his best weapon just suffered a concussion serious enough to knock him out of the game. And despite all of this, the Eagles are 5.5-point (or even 6.5-point, depending on where you shop) underdogs—the biggest point spread since 2009.

Should they be favored? Probably not. But that line is an insult.

5) The Eagles have a chance to drive a stake through the heart of the Evil Empire.

You know the old joke about how rooting for the Yankees is like rooting for Microsoft? Well rooting for the Patriots is like rooting for Google.

That said, I don’t actually hate the Patriots. In truth, I think it’s basically impossible not to like them, for all the reasons stated above. After all, you don’t have to actively root for a team to derive pleasure from their excellence.

But on the other hand, as much as I admire the Pats, at some point enough is enough. All monopolies have to get broken up eventually. And for the first time ever, we’ve seen cracks in the foundation which has bound Brady, Belichick, and Pats owner Bob Kraft together.

The Pats dynasty is dependent on that troika. And maybe getting upset in the Super Bowl by a no-name team from Philadelphia led by a backup quarterback nobody wanted will set in motion the end of the Patriots era.

For the next two weeks, we’re all Philadelphians.