A soft schedule and an awful NFC should have the Eagles thinking Super Bowl

There's no place like Philly during a 2-0 Eagles start. An awful NFC only adds to the Super Bowl hype.

Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts (1) and center Jason Kelce before the start of the Monday night game against the Minnesota Vikings at Lincoln Financial Field.Read moreHeather Khalifa / Staff Photographer

Published Sept. 20, 2022, 3:52 p.m. ET

On Tuesday afternoon, a buddy of mine texted me from the airport. He was waiting in line as one TSA agent demonstrated to another why Darius Slay is so good at covering the slot. Earlier, he’d overheard someone conclude that the Eagles defense is indeed dominant. Someone else suggested that 7-0 was in the cards.

The best way to appreciate the city of Philadelphia is to view it through the eyes of someone who is not from Philadelphia. This is never truer than the morning after an early-season Eagles win, especially if it happens in prime time. Anybody who accepts the whole Negadelphia trope needs to fly through Terminal C when the Birds are 2-0.

Monday night was an even more perfect storm than usual. Not only did the Eagles race out to a 14-0 lead en route to a 24-7 win. Not only did they humiliate a Vikings team that had just humiliated Aaron Rodgers. Not only did they watch their disrespected quarterback run for two touchdowns and throw for another in the best performance of his career. The Eagles also happened to do all of this on a night that began with their fan base listening to people crown the Bills as Super Bowl favorites for blowing out the Titans.

The psychology does not need to make sense. But it is very much the psychology. On the one hand, it’s infectious. On the other, infections make you sick.

The best thing to do is embrace the absurdity. Call up the Twitter search bar, type in Eagles+Super+Bowl, and enjoy the show. It will seem ridiculous to anybody who remembers what people were saying at the beginning of the season, and even more ridiculous to those who remember what they were saying last week. It will sound ridiculous right up to the moment that you look at the rest of the NFC.

Look, I’m not saying that this is the Eagles’ year. The silliest thing about any Super Bowl chatter is that very little has changed about their situation. Two weeks into the NFL season, the Eagles are exactly where everybody should have expected them to be when the whole thing began. They’ve played two games against two noodle-armed quarterbacks and two defenses that ranked in the bottom four in the NFL in total yardage allowed last season. They have won both of those games. If they hadn’t, the people would be demanding that somebody be fired. Tune in next week for the latest episode of Is Jonathan Gannon Good?

The biggest change in the Eagles’ circumstances are the circumstances of those around them. Overnight, it seems, the NFC has become the NBA’s Eastern Conference. Everybody stinks, except for a dwindling old guard, which looks as thin and gaunt as ever.

Tom Brady may or may not want to be playing football. Either way, his offensive line is a disaster. There are times when he looks and sounds like peak Scientology Tom Cruise.

Rodgers? Actually, he’s kind of like Brady, except with longer hair and a higher likelihood of skipping a game to binge-watch YouTube documentaries. Rodgers is still a very good quarterback. But he is a very good quarterback who no longer has a very good receiver. And it remains to be seen whether he still has a very good offensive line. Even if the Packers end up being who they have been while winning 13 games in each of the last three seasons, they are still a team that has lost to Jimmy Garoppolo twice in the playoffs. And Colin Kaepernick twice. And Eli Manning twice.

The Rams? The best you can say about the defending champs is that they appear to have some work to do. The last time they played in the Super Bowl, they missed the playoffs the following season. Matthew Stafford isn’t as good as people think even when his elbow isn’t fraying. Their cap management is what a Ponzi scheme looks like before it is revealed to be a Ponzi scheme.

No doubt, the Rams and Bucs remain the rightful favorites. Anybody who thinks otherwise doesn’t fully grasp how well-coached they are. Sean McVay has a ring and two NFC championships. His only playoff losses in between were to teams that were quarterbacked by Rodgers and Brady while his was quarterbacked by Jared Goff. The Bucs have Todd Bowles calling the defensive plays and Zombie Jon Snow under center.

But therein lies the point. Goff might be the fifth-best quarterback in the NFC this season, two years after the Rams got rid of him for a quarterback who never in his life had been the fifth-best quarterback in the NFC. Now, Stafford is third. And Jalen Hurts is almost inarguably fourth. As for Dak Prescott, we’ll only include him in these rankings if we can factor in all the games started by Andy Dalton or Ben DiNucci.

Into the void, the Eagles this way come. The Eagles may not have done anything unexpected by beating the Lions and the Vikings. Minnesota and Detroit both finished last season under .500, when the Eagles went 8-0 against such teams. At the same time, there’s something to be said for doing what is expected of you, especially in the razor-thin competitive margins of the NFL. The Eagles have done what good teams do: the things they are supposed to do.

That’s different from saying that they’ve proved anything of substance. As Slay said Monday night, “It’s early.” If the Eagles had played the Bills in Week 1 instead of the Lions, and the Rams had played the Lions instead of the Bills, what would we be saying? The Bucs have already beaten the Cowboys and the Saints.

So, yes, some perspective is in order. The NFC is bunk. The Super Bowl picture is as much about the bunk as it is about the Eagles. The Panthers look as bad with Baker Mayfield at quarterback as they did with Sam Darnold. The 49ers lost their franchise quarterback and are better off because of it. Seattle, Atlanta, and Chicago will spend the season figuring out which one gets the highest draft pick. The Giants will probably end up in that conversation as well. And they are currently 2-0.

We haven’t even mentioned Jameis Winston’s name. Or Kirk Cousins’. Or Carson Wentz’s. Or the fact that they might also have an argument as top-five NFC quarterbacks. For the Eagles, there is one pertinent question:

Who’s left?

That’s not a knock on the Eagles. If anything, it’s an invitation to party. Scout the parade route. Request February off. Walk your coworker through the technical aspects of lining up with inside leverage. The Eagles still need to show us that they can beat a winning team. But we know they can beat the bad ones. This year, that counts for a lot.