If things don’t get better for the Eagles against the Bucs, they could get much worse

EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. — You either die a hero or live long enough to allow Tyrod Taylor to go 15-of-20 for 229 yards in a half.

This is what it has come to for the Eagles. Less than a year ago, they came within a possession of winning the Super Bowl. Less than two months ago, they looked like a very good bet to get there again. Everywhere you looked, you saw reasons to think that this team was only just beginning a long and dominant reign atop the NFC.

Fast forward to Sunday evening. All you could see was disaster. There was the one unfolding in front of your eyes. There was the one awaiting the Eagles in Tampa next Monday. Most ominous of all was the one that was looming on the distant horizon, a darkening sky of retirement and regression and payroll bloat and serious questions about a lack of institutional control.

The Eagles better not be as bad as they looked against the Giants. If they are, this thing is gonna get a whole lot worse.

“We’ll see what this team is made of,” Jalen Hurts said after he and the defending NFC champs completed their late-season meltdown with a 27-10 shellacking by the Giants.

Indeed we will.

Those are the stakes for your wild-card matchup against the NFC South champion Buccaneers. What once looked to be a glorified bye week is now an existential threat. The big question facing the Eagles isn’t Baker Mayfield or Todd Bowles or playing a postseason game on the road. The big question is themselves.

Who are we? Are we the team we claimed we were while going 26-5 with a Super Bowl trip? Are we the team that went toe-to-toe with Andy Reid and Patrick Mahomes?

Or are we already a memory?

Those are the questions that rise from the ashes of a month like this. Of a loss like this. It may sound hyperbolic to ask them. But, then, only a month ago, you couldn’t even have imagined them.

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You know the straits are dire when the players themselves acknowledge them. Nobody in the visitor’s locker room at MetLife Stadium bothered to dispute the obvious. There is no way around it now. Not after the embarrassment the Eagles just went through. Not after no-showing against a dead-in-the-water Giants team that the former version of the Eagles had consistently dominated. Not when the No. 2 seed in the playoffs appeared to be on the table for much of the first half. The Eagles needed Dallas to lose to win the division and earn a couple of home playoff games. The Cowboys were doing exactly that halfway through their second quarter in Washington. But it didn’t matter. The Eagles were getting steamrolled.

They were doing it in a way that raises all implications. The $200 million quarterback looked slow to read, slower to react, the second-best player at the position on a field where the other guy was a 34-year-old journeyman backup. The new defensive scheme looked less functional than the one that got the old coordinator demoted. The secondary looked more lost than it ever has, barely contesting a 26-yard first-down pass on third-and-11, botching two straight assignments on back-to-back completions of 46 and 19 yards, the latter for a touchdown.

“I don’t know,” defensive end Josh Sweat said when asked if the Eagles could fix themselves in the playoffs. “The only thing we can do is go back to practice, go back to meetings, try to fix as much as we can. Just get on the same page. That’s all we can do. Go on to the next week and prepare for the next team.”

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You could ignore the obvious right up until that trio of completions during a 10-minute stretch of the second quarter. You could tell yourself that the Eagles had simply fallen victim to one of the periodic cold streaks that afflict all NFL teams. They were on the wrong side of some tough scheduling matchups, and some bad injury breaks. Their best cornerback was missing his fifth straight game. DeVonta Smith and D’Andre Swift were also absent. After A.J. Brown left the field with an injury, the Eagles were lining up in three-wide sets with Julio Jones, Quez Watkins, and Olamide Zaccheaus.

But there is no excuse for the totality of what we saw on Sunday and in the five weeks that preceded it. Something is wrong with the team. Uncomfortably wrong.

They have one more chance to get it back. They should beat the Bucs, and that’s something, because they really shouldn’t beat anybody. That’s how bad the NFC South is this year. We’ve already seen them do it once, 25-11, back in Week 3. If the Eagles are who we thought they were, who they think they are, who they need to be, they beat Mayfield and Bowles and they do it easily.

» READ MORE: Eagles grades: Disaster strikes again as several phases struggle and earn F marks in Giants loss

If they don’t?

Then the floodgates open. The structural doubts flood in. Will Jason Kelce retire? What about Fletcher Cox and Brandon Graham? Will Darius Slay be back? If he does, will he be any good? Will James Bradberry lose another step? Will Swift leave as a free agent? Will Haason Reddick suddenly become happy with his contract? What about Smith’s looming extension? Can Nick Sirianni really survive a first-round exit on top of this inexplicably broken last month? Can the Eagles really survive another cycle of Super Bowl followed by dysfunction? Can they really afford a third coaching search in nine years?

“I don’t think there’s any doubts in the locker room,” tight end Dallas Goedert said. “There might be doubts outside the building, but those guys aren’t in the building, going to work every day with us. We’ve got a lot of confidence in the locker room and the belief on the outside isn’t going to waver what we believe on the inside. We’ve got everything we need to go on a really good run.”

Do they?

Do they have it?

Do they believe it?

It’s amazing to be asking these questions, given who they are and where they’ve been. It’s also impossible to ignore them.

Things change fast in the NFL. We’ve seen Hurts go from the best player in the league to shut down and stymied by a weak Giants defense. He needs to reemerge, and he needs to do it fast. This was supposed to be the postseason when Hurts and Sirianni finish their business. Now, it’s one where they have everything to prove.