The Eagles made it clear Sunday night: They’re a Super Bowl-caliber team

INGLEWOOD, Calif. — The Eagles have reached the point that most NFL teams aspire to and only the best of the best can handle with the right combination of confidence and care.

They are 9-2 now after their 37-20 victory Sunday over the Rams at SoFi Stadium. They seized control of the game in the second quarter — against a team that had been rolling, that had won four of its previous five games — and never let go. They have pulled away from the other three teams in the NFC East, one of which (the Washington Commanders) isn’t ready yet to win consistently and two of which (the New York Giants and Dallas Cowboys) are piles of offal. They are at worst the second-best team in the conference; only the Detroit Lions are superior, and the distance between the two teams would depend on whether they were facing each other at Ford Field or Lincoln Financial Field.

They have Saquon Barkley, who has been the best running back — perhaps the best player, period — in the league this season. It would be correct to say that watching Barkley run is like watching water flow over rocks … except to capture the full feeling of watching Barkley, the water would also have to flow around the rocks and flow through the air and flow from side to side as if it were sloshing inside an invisible washing machine. Barkley rushed for 255 yards and two touchdowns — both of which were at least 70 yards — against the Rams. John Mara, the owner of the franchise that Barkley used to play for, must have been sick.

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The Eagles have A.J. Brown, who is perhaps the best wide receiver in the league. They have an offensive line that is as good as any in the league. They have Vic Fangio overseeing their defense and Kellen Moore overseeing their offense, coordinators who are savvy and experienced and whose units have been improving gradually week by week. They have Nick Sirianni, a head coach for whom the phrase He must be doing something right had to have been invented. Under him, the Eagles do a lot of things that make you shake your head, but the thing they do most of all is win.

“Everyone’s going to be telling us how good we are,” Sirianni said. “Everyone’s going to be telling us, ‘You’re one of the better teams.’ We don’t listen to that. All we’ve got to do is put our heads down and work. It’s just like when people tell you that you aren’t good enough and you’ve got to block it out and put your head down and work. It’s the same situation here. What’s going to happen, obviously — and this is what I told our team after — is everyone’s going to be calling you. The media’s going to be telling you how good you are. That all doesn’t matter. All that matters is we go back to work."

The Eagles have plugged two rookies into their secondary, Quinyon Mitchell and Cooper DeJean, and a former pass rusher in at linebacker, Zack Baun, and the defense has been terrific for seven straight games now. They have Jalen Hurts, a quarterback who apparently has decided that committing a turnover is the worst of all outcomes for him and his team and who is going out of his way to not commit one. Given the talent around him, given the benefits of being a team that simply doesn’t mess up as often as its opponents do, that’s not the worst approach.

“You’ve got to remember what wins games, and a lot of it is how you handle Wednesday, Thursday, Friday practices,” tackle Lane Johnson said. “All that stuff can translate to the game on Sunday. It’s not just ‘Show up and play and win.’ There’s a lot of stuff that goes into the process to win games. If you have good, clean, crisp practices, if you preach, ‘Don’t turn over the ball,’ if you preach taking away the ball and playing physical, some of that stuff sounds redundant when you’re listening to it, but it’s really what it boils down to. Anybody can knock you on your a— if you don’t have everything detailed.

“I want to remember what wins games, and it’s the week. It’s Wednesdays and Thursdays when you feel like [crap] and you don’t want to do anything. That’s what wins games.”

What this bounty of riches means is simple: The Eagles are a contender and should be evaluated as such, because they will judge themselves by that standard. Anything less than an appearance in Super Bowl LIX ought to be regarded as a disappointment. Anything less than an appearance in the NFC championship game ought to be regarded as a failure. That’s the point they’ve reached. That’s the way to look at them. They were at this point two years ago, when they were one half away from the second Super Bowl victory in their history. They are at this point again.

“We’re not satisfied,“ Hurts said. ”We weren’t satisfied in the past, and we’re not satisfied now.”

The Rams are no pushover. They have a Hall of Fame quarterback in Matthew Stafford and two game-breaking receivers in Cooper Kupp and Puka Nacua and one of the NFL’s sharpest minds in coach Sean McVay. And the Eagles tore them apart. A performance like this one, against an opponent like this one, raises the stakes. The standard is established. Let’s see if they can maintain this excellence and meet it.