PHILADELPHIA — Eleven months later, no music blasted. No strobe lights canvassed the locker room and no cigar smoke wafted through its revelry.
There was not a Lombardi Trophy to parade Sunday night in Philadelphia nor Champagne bottles to uncork with protective goggles.
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Because unlike last season, the Eagles are not going home Super Bowl champions.
This season, they will not even win a playoff game.
This is the standard outcome: Repeat titles elude NFL champions more often than this century’s Kansas City Chiefs and New England Patriots of late make it seem.
It’s not shocking the Eagles succumbed to this fate: The outcome of a 23-19 home wild-card loss to the San Francisco 49ers was an upset by betting standards — but its recipe was familiar to Eagles players and fans alike.
For the sixth time this season, the Eagles failed to score a touchdown in the second half. A sputtering offense couldn’t capitalize on its consistent defense. So an overachieving, resilient 49ers team rebounded from its latest major injury (tight end George Kittle was carted off with a torn Achilles) to outlast an underachieving, searching Eagles team that never quite figured out how to capture their offensive potential in a way a strikingly similar cast did a year ago.
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Accountability will prompt changes. Offensive coordinator Kevin Patullo is unlikely to return even as players insist publicly that execution, rather than play-calling or scheme, doomed them. Coordinator Brian Johnson lost his job two seasons ago for an offensive “regression” to ranking seventh in scoring and eighth in offensive yardage. Those numbers held in last year’s Super Bowl run, before this season’s offense fell to 19th in scoring and 24th in yardage.
Quarterback Jalen Hurts emphasized that he takes full ownership for the mistakes. Receiver DeVonta Smith used a version of the word “execution” 16 times in fewer than six minutes at his locker. Left tackle Jordan Mailata raised his voice to emphasize that it would be “very unfair” to blame Patullo rather than players.
None of their statements changed the finality of the outcome, an earlier-than-hoped exit for a team with some young players who hadn’t yet experienced ending the NFL season with a loss. The Eagles were left literally and metaphorically shaking their heads after three fourth-quarter lead changes in a fittingly wild wild-card weekend.
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The elation of the Lombardi seemed so recent and also so distant.
“I mean, s***, we had the highs of the highs; we’re back to the lows of the lows,” offensive tackle Fred Johnson said. “Only thing you can do is pick yourself up, brush off the dust, come back in April with who you got. You don’t know what’s going to change.
“This team had a one-year shelf life. And it sucks to go out like this.”
After A.J. Brown struggled, Eagles try to sort through explanations
Some players spoke with their heads shaking or hanging; still others resting their hands dejectedly on their hips.
Smith crossed his arms as he addressed reporters.
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“Offensively, we didn’t execute,” he said after his team-high eight catches for 70 yards. “You can’t play one half of football. I mean, we’ve been preaching for that the whole year and we constantly did that.”
At halftime, the Eagles led 13-10 thanks to a pair of touchdowns courtesy of tight end Dallas Goedert. The offense had begun surely enough.
Twenty rushes to 16 passes helped Philadelphia nearly double the 49ers’ first-half time of possession, 19:06 to 10:54. Niners quarterback Brock Purdy was hitting receivers for explosives to the tune of a Demarcus Robinson 64-yarder and Jauan Jennings for 45, but couldn’t the Eagles subsist as running back Saquon Barkley ripped off a 29-yard burst — to the right side that famously was without six-time Pro Bowl tackle Lane Johnson, no less?
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But this was an Eagles team that had outscored opponents in the first half by an average of 3.76 points per game, per TruMediaSports, while opponents outscored them by 0.41 points on average in the second.
Put another way: This Eagles team has not inspired confidence in its ability to maintain and extend leads even as they won the NFC East and secured the NFC’s No. 3 seed. Call it a lack of rhythm or an influx of penalties or an absence of explosive plays — regardless, the result was an Eagles team that would not win relying on second-half runs, and a 49ers defense that sensed loading the box more after halftime would make a difference.
Cue the decision-making narratives.
“If it goes the way you want it to go in the first half and then not the second half, I think that’s the go-to of people [thinking] you take your foot off the gas,” Eagles head coach Nick Sirianni said. “But we were playing more balanced, got the run game going a little bit, trying to mix our play-actions in, trying to get our passes in to create explosives. At the end of the day, we didn’t create enough explosives. They did; give them credit. They made more plays than we did. They coached better than we did.
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“And that’s why they won.”
The 49ers rebounded from the loss of Kittle to register an explosive the very next play. They would later score a pair of fourth-quarter touchdowns via a trick play from Jennings to Christian McCaffrey, and a McCaffrey catch from Purdy on Purdy’s final read of his designed progressions.
The Eagles’ stars didn’t step up concurrently, receiver A.J. Brown catching just three of seven targets for 25 yards on a night in which he dropped a pass on third-and-5 with 2:25 to play. Goedert ultimately caught a fourth-down target the next play that kept the Eagles’ hopes alive another minute. With 40 seconds to play, they turned the ball over on downs.
Without Brown as a serious threat Sunday night, the Eagles looked like a collection of talented individuals while the 49ers looked like a scrappy team.
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“We knew we couldn’t come in here and just win by certain guys making plays,” Shanahan said. “We knew we had to come here and win as a complete team, and I really believed we played as a complete team today and that’s why we got it done.”
Strong defensive stretches from the Eagles weren’t enough, Philadelphia’s offense failing to get a first down on an initial interception-gifted possession and settling for a field goal on the second.
And Brown’s most memorable moment wasn’t a catch: The receiver instead drew attention for spatting with Sirianni on the sideline in an exchange that teammates and Sirianni sought to downplay while Brown evaded media altogether.
Sirianni admitted both he and Brown are “emotional,” while teammates praised the receiver as positive, supportive and strongly committed to their team’s winning. Questions will still linger through the offseason about whether the Eagles bring back a receiver who routinely made headlines this season while his receiving yards per game dipped from three straight seasons above 80 to 66.9.
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Is Brown mercurial or simply passionate?
“I think there can be times where people think he’s upset or he doesn’t want to be here or whatever, but I mean, from getting to know him, he just wants to win and he wants to help the team win,” cornerback Cooper DeJean told Yahoo Sports. “People can say what they want, but that’s the type of guy he is. He’s going to try and do anything he can to fix things that need to be fixed so we can be a winning football team.
“[He’s a] guy who’s very passionate about the game of football and loves winning and wants to help the team win.”
As Eagles fail to follow recipe from good to great, Jalen Hurts charts path forward
Between their 2022 season Super Bowl loss and their 2024 season Super Bowl win, the Eagles experienced a late-season slump.
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They started their season 10-1, two years ago, before losing six of their last seven contests in an unruly spiral.
After their wild-card loss at Tampa Bay that season, frustration permeated the visiting locker room. Hurts evaded a question about Sirianni. Days passed before it became clear the Eagles would return their head coach.
This wild-card exit felt very different.
Sure, solemnity returned to a team that has won at least 11 games in each of the last four seasons. But disappointment, rather than frustration, characterized this locker room. A sense of unity, rather than obvious fractures, permeated. The Eagles’ defense may lose some players in free agency, but their veterans and young draft picks alike have thrived under veteran coordinator Vic Fangio. Even if Brown does not return to Philadelphia next season — and that’s no guarantee, but his public displeasure this season makes it an obvious question — the Eagles have ample talent that any of a number of available coordinators should be able to harness.
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Unlike in Tampa two years ago, no one was asking nor wondering about Sirianni’s job security Sunday night. Tension was far milder than two years ago for a team that has shown it can climb back from a fall.
For the Eagles to return to winning next season, they’ll need to assess: What went wrong this year? Where are the clearest areas for growth?
They’ll look to execution and communication; reduction of penalties and increase in focus. Schematic changes will come. Offense will dominate the offseason focus.
“Good teams learn from their mistakes and great teams learn from others’,” Mailata said. “We weren’t learning from each other’s mistakes …[so] the same things keep happening.”
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Next season, they’ll have a chance to change that.
“Winning is hard,” Hurts said. “Nothing about it is easy, especially when you’re trying to repeat. Everything was clear for us and what we wanted to accomplish this year, and we came up short. And so you have no choice but to learn from it, especially if you have a great passion about it.
“I take ownership for not being able to put points on the board. It all starts with me and ends with me. And so there’s a sense of a lot there that you can learn from.”