Eagles must hope injuries are the main culprit for seemingly lost season

Even among the extremely vocal contingent of Eagles die-hards, there wasn’t a lot of faith that Philadelphia was going to turn its season around in the Superdome on Sunday. Oddsmakers weren’t any more optimistic in their outlook, as the Eagles opened last week as nine-point underdogs, the largest point spread against a defending champ in nearly a decade.

That pessimism was certainly vindicated, as the beating the Saints put on the Eagles was more vicious and thorough than expected. All told, the 48-7 loss by the Eagles goes down as the worst by a defending Super Bowl champ ever. 

Back in February, the Eagles were so powerful, they took down the juggernaut Patriots with their backup quarterback. Now they’re floundering enough that some are questioning whether the team is still set up to compete over the long haul.

By virtue of belonging to the thoroughly middling NFC East of 2018, the 4-6 Eagles are still only two games out of first place and therefore technically alive. But it’s hard to have any faith in a team that emerged from its bye week at the start of November to lose a critical division game and then got drubbed by another conference favorite on the road. Philadelphia has both meetings left with Washington and one more with Dallas, so there’s opportunity to do damage in the division race. But two of those three games are on the road. The Eagles also have a road game remaining against the Rams, and if Sunday’s performance is any indication, that’s likely to be a bloodbath as well.

Much fuss is usually made when defending champs fail to qualify for the postseason, though it’s hardly uncommon in modern NFL history. Assuming the Eagles do come up short, which is probably reasonable to conclude at this point, that means 17 of the 52 — roughly a third — defending champs of the Super Bowl era failed to make the postseason the following year.

There are several historical examples that suggest this lost season shouldn’t faze Eagles fans. The 49ers missed the playoffs after their first Super Bowl victory following the 1981 season. They went on to be the team of the decade, winning three more. No less esteemed a football mind than Bill Walsh said it takes five years for a team to really come together. The Patriots missed the playoffs after their first Super Bowl win 17 years ago, and their stretch of dominance continues to this day. The Steelers missed the playoffs following each of their title wins in the aughts, and in each case they were back in the Super Bowl within a few years.

Of course, there are also examples that show a particular title team had indeed fallen off the next year after peaking in its Super Bowl season. The decline had come, and there was no bouncing back without wholesale changes.

One would think the Eagles have more in common with the early dynasty teams than here-today-gone-tomorrow champs that washed out. After all, the Eagles have their established franchise quarterback and a daring head coach early in his run with the team. But context is important here. Injuries have decimated the team, though play-calling has frequently been an issue on both sides of the ball. A champion that saw 19 starters return also saw some players regress.

So are the Eagles the latest of those dynastic teams that suffered an early hiccup after their first title, only to rebound, or are they more like the 2012 Ravens and beyond: the beneficiaries of a quarterback who got hot one postseason? Baltimore missed the playoffs the year following its Super Bowl win and has been more or less an average team in the five seasons since.

There’s compelling logic in the injury angle. The Eagles' secondary especially has been stripped bare because of injuries. The defensive line has been considered among the deepest position groups in football, but it had to be with Derek Barnett and Tim Jernigan missing. Given that the Saints entered Sunday having allowed only nine sacks in nine games, the Eagles knew they would struggle to get home on the quarterback, a deficiency made all the more salient by the problems in coverage.

Carson Wentz’s performance Sunday ranks among the worst of his career, and it was reported the next morning that forcing Wentz to beat them was exactly the Saints' plan. They wanted to challenge Wentz, and he was lacking. It was easy to notice the desperation as he tried to keep pace with the New Orleans offense, and that led to his three interceptions. 

As for the coaching, any championship team is likely to have coaches plucked in the offseason, and a lot of fans have groused about what the offense has lacked in crispness this season since Frank Reich left to take over the Colts and John DeFilippo jumped ship to become the offensive coordinator of the Vikings. The offensive line has declined as well, with Jason Peters admitting he’s been less of a player following last year’s ACL tear. That has caused the running game to suffer, as has the absence of Jay Ajayi and Darren Sproles.

After the legend of Doug Pederson took flight following gutsy calls in the Super Bowl, a return to the mean was going to be a disappointment for fans. If any game was going to produce an urgency to score like Philly did against the Patriots, it was Sunday. Yet, the day after, there was Pederson saying he regrets not going for it on fourth-and-1 on the opening drive of the game. It’s hard to imagine that picking up one first down on your side of the field swings the game enough to account for a 41-point loss. It’s the more muddled decision-making overall that has some Eagles fans unable to avoid knocking a coach who already has a statue outside the Linc.

The Eagles' championship march was framed as a triumph despite injuries at significant positions. The injury bug got Philly even worse this season, hitting far more players overall rather than just the biggest names. Wentz’s season has still been really good despite Sunday’s disaster, when one considers how quarterbacks typically struggle the year after coming back from the type of injury that ended his 2017 season.

Only a long shot hope can save the Eagles from simply closing out a lost season. A Super Bowl hangover isn’t the worst thing in the world so long as the team pulls itself together for 2019. If injuries do turn out to be the big problem, they can just look toward first-place Washington for encouragement. Last year the 'Skins were the injury-ravaged ones, and now they’re outperforming middling expectations. So the Eagles have to hope it was the injuries more than anything that's led to such a disappointing campaign.