Eagles turned the NFC championship into a game of ‘mental warfare.’ Turns out, the Commanders were unarmed.

Demoralizing.

That’s how it feels to play against this Eagles offense. Really, there is no other way it can feel. Snap after snap. Run after run after slant after run. Nothing there? Throw it away and live to see another down. Then run it some more. Four, 5, 60 yards at a time. All of them bruising. All of them gained with the understanding that they will continue gaining more until there is none left to gain.

The Eagles may not have the most electric offense in modern NFL history. But it is the most inevitable. They beat you up until you break, assuming you do not break right away.

“You can always tell when a team is about to give up,” Mekhi Becton said with a glimmer in his eye that matched the one that sparkled off the diamond chain hanging from his neck.

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The Eagles guard was thinking about a specific moment as he said this. Standing at his locker in the wake of the Eagles’ 55-23 thumping of the Commanders in the NFC championship, Becton smiled devilishly as he thought back on the sequence that served to confirm that their Super Bowl berth was booked. Early fourth quarter, first-and-goal at the Washington 1-yard line, the Commanders clinging to an 11-point deficit that, in a vacuum, looked somewhat tenuous. As the Eagles took their familiar places at the line of scrimmage — Jalen Hurts tight under center, everyone else tight to him — they looked across the neutral zone and knew that it was over. What happened next only served as confirmation.

The first offside call was innocent enough. Then came the second, Washington linebacker Frankie Luvu flying Mortal Kombat style over the offensive line, crashing to the ground in the offensive backfield with the ball still unsnapped.

After the third offside penalty, referee Shawn Hochuli announced that any future Commanders offside penalty would be accompanied by a 15-yard unsportsmanlike conduct penalty. After the fourth infraction was indeed committed, Hochuli updated his executive order, announcing that the Commanders had been advised that the officiating crew could and would elect to award the Eagles a touchdown if the offside-ing continued.

“Simply put, a team can’t commit multiple fouls in an effort to prevent the score,” Hochuli told a pool reporter later. “Again, if it’s meant to prevent a score, we can essentially award the score.”

Either way, it wouldn’t have mattered. The Commanders were beaten. Hurts plunged over the goal line, the Eagles took a 41-23 lead, and the fourth quarter became a victory lap.

“That was mental warfare,” Eagles tackle Jordan Mailata said. “That’s all that was. Mental warfare.”

This is more than a Super Bowl-caliber offense. It is a will-breaker. You see the effects of it all over the field. You saw it on Sunday.

As usual, it was Saquon Barkley and the offensive line setting the tone. First play of the game. Six other times you had seen it this season. Here it was again. Barkley gathered the ball, bounced a few defenders out of his way, and set his sights on the goal line 60 yards in the distance. It is a presumptuous thing, to be thinking end zone on the dark side of the 50-yard line. Yet, here again, his head was in the right place.

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It is getting to a point where you see it before he does: the scattered bodies, the over-pursuit, and then the seam. That is what you saw the first time Barkley touched the ball in his first NFC championship game: daylight.

“He has tremendous balance when he gets hit,” Mailata said. “Contact balance, I don’t even know if that’s a thing. I wish we had a camera in our helmet so you guys could see that. It’s a truly special view.”

There was no looking back. Not while Barkley was running, and certainly not after he’d crossed the goal line to give the Eagles a lead they’d never relinquish. A Super Bowl berth that many suspected was a formality quickly revealed itself to be so.

Barkley would finish with 15 carries for 118 yards and three touchdowns, the last of them coming on an easy 4-yard scamper with 7 minutes, 58 seconds left that gave the Eagles a 48-23 lead. It was Barkley’s fifth straight game with at least 118 yards, including 119 in the playoff opener against the Green Bay Packers and 205 in last week’s divisional-round win over the Los Angeles Rams. He now has seven runs of 60-plus yards this season. The rest of the NFL has combined for 14. No other running back has more than two.

This is exactly what Howie Roseman, Jeffrey Lurie, and Nick Sirianni envisioned when they made Barkley their free-agent priority this past offseason. Never in the history of the NFL has a move that raised so many eyebrows at the outset looked so obvious in hindsight. You pair the hardest-running back in the league with its hardest-blocking offensive line and, once you do, you can throw your pass-first paradigm out the window. It is almost unfair that the Eagles complement Barkley and their running game with a couple of wide receivers who cannot be single-covered and a quarterback who must be accounted for at all times.

On Sunday, the frustration set in early for the Commanders. They are an impressive team. They played hard. They played fast. They would have had a shot if they’d played perfectly. But they didn’t, which is the way it usually turns when perfection feels like a necessity.

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After the Commanders cut the Eagles’ lead to 14-12 on a 36-yard touchdown catch-and-run by Terry McLaurin, they had the choice between kicking the extra point or attempting to tie the game with a two-point conversion. There is a strain of coaching logic that deems it unwise to chase points in the first half: If the two-point conversion fails, your opponent needs only a touchdown and PAT to make it a two-possession game. It is a sensible school of thought, and maybe the Commanders would have deemed it applicable had they been playing a typical NFL offense. But the Eagles are an offense that can seemingly gain 2 yards at will. So even if Washington had kicked the PAT to make it 14-13, there was a decent chance the Eagles would simply go for two after their next touchdown, making it a two-score game. Might as well go for the tie, right?

These are the subtle ways the Eagles’ might manifests itself even when Barkley isn’t actively manifesting himself. As it turns out, the Eagles out-thought themselves and went for two anyway after their next touchdown. And, as it turns out, the Commanders stopped them. Sort out the logic as you wish. The point stands: The Eagles chew up real estate both in between the lines and in between the ears.

It is, as Mailata said, mental warfare.

One more game of it, and they will be world champs.