Talent vs. Vibes: How the Philadelphia Eagles avoided an 'avalanche' to get to Super Bowl LIX
Remember when this team was about to light itself on fire? Today, the Eagles will play in Super Bowl LIX. Here's how they righted the ship. ("Nobody knows what we got going on in here.")
NEW ORLEANS — Loss to damning loss, confusion deepened. The Philadelphia Eagles’ 2023 season was caving in and players couldn’t point to one obvious root cause. That’s what was most frustrating. Reed Blankenship’s brain is still boggled.
“Knowing that you can’t get in that rhythm. Something’s off,” the Eagles safety laments. “It was a sucky feeling I hope I never have to experience again.”
Central to that “sucky feeling” was mounting, debilitating pressure. A 10-1 start gave way to a humiliating 1-6 finish. Pressure anaconda-squeezed the entire team until all bones were crushed in the wild-card round against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and there were steep consequences. Both coordinators were fired. Relationships amongst teammates started to fracture. Locals nearly banished Nick Sirianni to the alley to live with Rickety Cricket.
Each team each season is different, true. But one month into the 2024 season, it sure didn’t seem that way. The Eagles started 2-2, got blasted by those Bucs again and — again — started to resemble more soap opera than football club. All of the same melodramatic scenes replayed: Sirianni shouting at his own fans after a win over pathetic Cleveland, A.J. Brown ripping the passing game after a narrow win over 3-10 Carolina, Brandon Graham insinuating that the “1” and “11” don’t like each other that much. Listen closely and you’ll hear Jalen Hurts take a passive-aggressive jab at his head coach, too.
Another December meltdown felt imminent.
Across the league, this is how championship windows slam shut.
Only… it didn’t.
All week in New Orleans, there’s been two overwhelming narratives surrounding these Eagles. One, this team lacks a discernible weakness. GM Howie Roseman performed offseason Whipple surgery on this roster and now, 1 through 53, you’ll only find a few hang nails. Two, they genuinely love each other. So, voila. Here they are. Back in the Super Bowl against the Kansas City Chiefs as if all nonsense was nothing but a bad dream. No bickering No bad blood. And at no point, Blankenship adds, was this locker room paralyzed by Here We Go Again dread. Not even after they were routed on that same field in Tampa.
“We could’ve thought that way,” Blankenship says. “You just look at each other. You’ve got to be men in the room and own up to your mistakes. And once you do that, that honestly builds your relationship stronger. We did that as a defense, as an offense, everything. We came together. Even Sirianni was doing his thing in team meetings. He’s built this team around relationships — being brothers, being this tight-knit group — and I felt like we took that and ran with it. We didn’t want to fall into the avalanche that everybody else was saying: ‘Oh, it’s the same thing that we’re seeing.’ It’s like, ‘No, we’re going to do our own thing. It’s us against the world. Nobody knows what we got going on in here.’”
If there’s a lesson to glean from these Eagles, it’s this: Teams should not operate out of fear in March and April.
Roseman has never been afraid to take gigantic swings because he knows the worst place to live in the NFL is the 8-9 & 9-8 middle. Most of his swings connect, too. The Eagles relentlessly pursue raw talent — everywhere — and the concepts of “togetherness” and “culture” are more of a byproduct.
He drafted defensive tackle Jalen Carter ninth overall in ’23, even as much of the NFL scouting community was horrified by what they were hearing in Georgia. He brought back safety C.J. Gardner-Johnson, voted the most annoying player in the league by a landslide. It’s no coincidence the secondary slumped without him. Football is still a malevolent sport that demands an element of nasty. Brown can be temperamental, but who cares? This trade with the Tennessee Titans remains one of the greatest fleecings in team history. Roseman paired Saquon Barkley with a powerhouse offensive line.
Fearlessness brought Philly back to the Super Bowl. One of the longest-tenured vets, edge rusher Josh Sweat, has lived plenty of ups and downs the last seven years.
He believes the Eagles needed to crash to rock bottom in ’23 to get here.
“To be real, I don’t think we’re here without last year happening,” Sweat says. “If last year didn’t happen, I don’t know if we would’ve been this strong. I don’t think we would’ve made the changes we needed to. We built off whatever we had.”
To rebound, there needed to be consequences. The Eagles broke in four new starters on defense. Those who survived the disaster were hardened by the experience.
“You could see how well the season was going until, boom, we hit that wall and everybody suffered for it,” Sweat says. “And at the end of the year, a lot of people got punished for it. So, it’s like, ‘Man, you just don't want it to happen again.’”
When Philly entered its Week 5 bye week at 2-2, off the 33-16 drubbing in Tampa, players had direct conversations with each other and got the defense fixed. The wrath of new coordinator Vic Fangio is real but rather than bitch about his old-school coaching, they listened, responded and — as explored — the rapid growth of rookies Quinyon Mitchell and Cooper DeJean ignited the secondary.
Philadelphia hasn’t been shy in adding all flavors of personality to its locker room.
This is a team that valued talent over vibes and, eventually, the vibes got right for a playoff run.
Defensive end Thomas Booker IV, one of the team’s most thoughtful pros, believes the Eagles maintained a “unified front” through it all. Whenever two teammates have beef they’re quick to talk it out — bluntly — and fix the problem.
The difference here is that Eagles brass isn’t afraid of beefs. Different characters are bound to clash. Simply, they deal with it.
“We have a team full of playmakers and guys have different dispositions,” Booker says, “but everyone wants to contribute and I think that’s always a good thing. You might have disagreements about how that might be done, but we’re always going to come together.”
There isn’t merely one player who’ll speak up. Through the season, there’s been several. The first two names Booker mentions are Carter and Gardner-Johnson.
To recap, Georgia’s Carter entered the league with a ton of baggage. He pleaded no contest to two misdemeanor charges for his role in a fatal car crash. Here’s how NFL scouts described Carter to our Bob McGinn ahead of the 2023 draft.:
“His football character’s a mess.”
“I don’t trust that he likes football. Supremely talented, immature, does it on his pace. … If he loved football, I mean really loved it, he’d be a fucking beast.”
“It’ll be like (the) dumb ass from Tennessee. What was his name? Haynesworth.”
“They haven’t found a person yet at Georgia that wasn’t relieved that the season ended and he was gone. Not one. What’s ironic about it is Georgia would have won the national championship without him but they would not have won it without Stetson Bennett. And he’s so far down the rail we’re not even talking about him.”
This season, Carter has been a menace in the middle of Fangio’s defense with 51 tackles (14 for loss), 6.5 sacks, three forced fumbles, nine pass breakups through 19 games. He earned second team All Pro honors. Relay the opinion of theses scouts to Booker and he predictably, politely disagrees. He claims Carter practices hard, asks questions in meetings that nobody else even thinks of asking and brings it all to the field.
“JC is a hardworking dude who’s detail-oriented, who obviously has talent and ability that a lot of us probably haven’t ever seen before,” Booker says. “He’s a leader. And he leads through example first and foremost. When we need to play, there’s a good chance it’s coming from 98.”
Surely, there were teams that knew Carter possessed this ability but still wanted to keep him far away from their locker room. Maybe they’re proven right. The 23-year-old is only getting started. But the Eagles bet that — reunited with Bulldog teammates — Carter would stay motivated on the field and stay out of trouble off it.
Between the whistles, he’s total bedlam in the best possible ways. Men of his size (6 foot 3, 314 pounds) are not this elusive, this violent and calling their shot before the ball’s even snapped. In real time, Booker has seen how Carter enters this malicious “zone,” and it helps that Fangio’s scheme cuts him loose.
“He is a very, very instinctual player,” Booker says. “He has a football IQ that’s really, really incredible and I think isn’t talked about enough. Truly. And I think it allows him to find his own lane within the scheme and the system to make the incredible plays that you see.”
Such as trying to catch a quarterback spike. Carter saw a high school kid on YouTube pull off the stunt and tried it himself with three seconds left in the first half against Mahomes’ Chiefs as a rookie.
Carter is always attempting stunts in the trenches that are foreign to other defensive linemen.
Adds Booker: “The way he thinks about the game, it’s different.”
And linebacker Oren Burks: “He competes, he does things the right way. And just seeing his game step up from the last year to this year has been amazing. He’s going to have a long career making game-changing plays. The maturity, it’s starting to show up. He's going to be a hell of a player for a long time.”
On the back end, there’s Gardner-Johnson. A pro who talks junk to anyone who’ll listen before wearing out his welcome… latching on with a new team… then shredding his previous employer. He’s never shy when it comes to the New Orleans Saints and, this week, described his 2023 season with the Detroit Lions as “hell.” But in-between, he’s spent two stints with these Eagles. Booker acknowledges that the animated 27-year old enjoys to “chirp” at opponents on the field. In Philly? they love Gardner-Johnson’s biting F-U energy. “We feed off of it,” he says. The GM took chances, and it paid off. To Booker, both “CJ” and “JC” bring a palpable passion to the defense. Hard to argue with results. During the regular season, Gardner-Johnson picked off six passes with 116 return yards.
“That’s what attracts a lot of people towards them,” Booker says. “That’s why they play great ball. They play with their hair on fire.”
Opponents would certainly describe Gardner-Johnson’s personality on the field one way.
This week, I asked the safety how he’d put his own game in his own words.
“I’m true to the game of football,” Gardner-Johnson says. “I know what old-school football looks like and I’m going to bring it back. Ed Reed. Sean Taylor. Physical. Gritty. Even Ochocinco did it.”
When the Eagles slumped to 2-2, Sweat took solace in the Eagles defense holding the Saints to only 12 points fresh off the Saints scoring 91 on Carolina and Dallas the previous two weeks. He didn’t sense any panic. Philadelphia still had all six of its divisional games ahead. There were no rah-rah speeches required, and he saw a roster full of mentally tough players. Sweat is one baritone voice to follow. Long before this gut-check moment for the Eagles — before his NFL career even began — we chatted about a much more traumatic episode in his life. Back in high school, his leg snapped in half. A doctor told him his football career was essentially finished and amputation was a possibility. On an extra point, Sweat dislocated his knee and blood wasn’t flowing to the rest of his leg. (“The bottom of the leg would’ve died if it didn’t have enough blood,” he told me then.)
“It just made my grind different,” Sweat says this week. “So it’s just changed me to be the worker I am.”
The GM is not perfect. Imagine where the Eagles would be if Russell Wilson didn’t nix a trade to Philadelphia in 2022. But through all hits, all misses, all risks, Roseman never appears constrained by doubt or paranoia — at all. And he knows what type of player he’s looking for in the draft, in free agency, via trade. Surly, prickly, volatile individuals can be a good thing in a dangerous sport.
Kellen Moore calls the offense. Fangio calls the defense. If you’re staring at Sirianni like The Bobs in Office Space — wondering “What would you say you do here?” — it’s this ability to take in Roseman’s collection of gambles and steer talent toward a happy place. When Barkley was only 13 yards shy from his career high vs. his former team, Sirianni asked him if he wanted to go for it. Barkley said to “let the young boys eat.” Even after fist-pumping, the head coach from Jamestown, NY double-checked to make sure it was what his star back wanted. A small mic’d up moment that showed how the head coach connects.
Everyone’s getting along. No small thing because even the vibes on great teams can fluctuate year to year.
When we caught up with Joe Whitt, the Washington Commanders defensive coordinator compared his ‘24 squad to the 2010 Packers. Whitt was the cornerbacks coach then. The 2010 group that won a Super Bowl loved each other. The 2011 edition that went 15-1? Not so much. Consequently, those Packers were stunned by the New York Giants in the divisional round of the playoffs. The Eagles relentlessly pursued talent, Sirianni managed that talent and — now — the culture’s solid again after that ’23 nightmare.
Blankenship recalls the ’23 Eagles putting pressure on themselves. It doesn’t sound like that group was nearly as close as this one.
“We went into this year knowing that there’s no need to put all that unwanted pressure on you,” says Blankenship, “and we knew that we had to come together collectively as a group and have a better relationship. Not like we didn’t have a good relationship last year. Which we did. But you can definitely tell that everybody’s relationship with each other is genuine and that speaks volumes. You can’t get this far without not liking somebody. You know?
“If you can’t go to work and not like the guy you’re working with, you’re not going to mesh well.”
To Burks, a linebacker thrust into a starting role due to injury, all of this is a testament to what Sirianni’s built. He loves that the Eagles take chances on players with red flags because he’s seeing those gambles pay off. The angst between Hurts and Brown may be real, Sirianni’s temper is real, Carter is a wild card and who knows what Gardner-Johnson says next but — all along — the Eagles knew that listening to the analysis of it all on daytime television wouldn’t accomplish anything.
As voices universally predicted self-immolation for these 2024 Eagles, Burks insists players and coaches paid no attention. The Super Bowl is here. Talent prevailed.
“Talent,” Burks adds, “up and down the roster. It’s just a matter of putting everything together at the right time. I’ve just been really proud of this locker room. We’ve got guys with the right character, the right mindset, and that gives you a chance to play in the big one.
“We’ve got to take advantage of it on Sunday.”
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