The Eagles are trying to win a Super Bowl in an unusual way. There’s one model for how to do it.

It’s the question that has defined most of the Eagles’ season and their entire postseason: Can they keep winning like this? Everyone acknowledges that when it comes to the Eagles’ Super Bowl chances, that question cuts to the core of the matter. But there’s some murkiness in the last bit of it. That is, what does like this actually mean?

Based on the way Jalen Hurts performed against the Los Angeles Rams in the divisional round and the Packers in the wild-card round, like this means Can they keep winning with a quarterback who doesn’t turn the ball over but who also struggles to anticipate receivers breaking open, holds the ball too long, and now has a knee injury? Whew. That’s a lot of doubt packed into a couple of four-letter words. But then, there were a lot of four-letter words flying around Lincoln Financial Field late in the third quarter Sunday after Hurts failed to see Dallas Goedert open in the middle of the field and was sacked in the end zone for a safety. So what’s two more?

There’s another way to look at the question, though. You can look at the Eagles in their totality. You can recognize that — even if Hurts was playing splendidly, which he is not, and even if he was healthy, which he may not be for the NFC championship game against the Washington Commanders — they don’t fit the stereotypical profile for a Super Bowl team in the modern NFL.

Their quarterback doesn’t represent the primary strength of their offense; Saquon Barkley does. Their head coach isn’t regarded as a strategic savant; his coordinators are the play-calling brains of their respective operations. The Eagles hand the ball to an awesome running back, play terrific defense, and reduce the sport to its most basic and brutal form: We line up. You line up. We will beat you because we block and tackle better than you and because we don’t mess up.

Cool. Sounds like a Bears-Packers game from 1962. Where’s your Mahomes or Brady or Manning? Where’s Nick Foles suddenly playing better than any of those guys? Where’s the souped-up passing attack? Is Nick Sirianni outscheming any of his counterparts? Forget whether the Eagles can win like this. What team in recent history has won a Super Bowl like this?

Actually, at least one team has, and if you compare the 2024-25 Eagles to the 2013-14 Seattle Seahawks, the resemblances might surprise you. For instance …

Once Kellen Moore and Vic Fangio joined his coaching staff, Sirianni for a long time was perceived to be an Initech employee, and everyone who covered or followed the Eagles was a downsizing consultant asking him the same thing: What would ya say ya do here? But as this season has progressed, Sirianni’s value has become clearer. He’s a connector, a culture-setter, the guy who inspires and maintains buy-in from players. He is to the Eagles what Pete Carroll was to those ’13 Seahawks.

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The two aren’t identical. Carroll was 58 when the Seahawks hired him in early 2010; Sirianni hadn’t yet turned 40 when the Eagles hired him in early 2021. Because Carroll was an older coach, and older coaches are expected to be more staid, his enthusiasm, his motivational tactics, and his emotions-on-his-sleeve approach took some getting used to, more so than even Sirianni’s did. But as the Eagles have with Sirianni, Carroll’s players came to understand that he was sincere, which allowed him to manage a locker room full of outsized personalities and egos. Carroll wanted to ramp people up, one longtime acquaintance and observer of him told me recently, then manage the fire. He managed it well. It was his greatest strength as a head coach. It’s Sirianni’s, too.

Commanders head coach Dan Quinn was the defensive coordinator of the 2013 Seahawks, and he was in charge of the best-known defense in the NFL over the last two decades — and maybe the best, period. Behind the “Legion of Boom” — Richard Sherman, Earl Thomas, Kam Chancellor, and the rest of its terrific defensive backfield — Seattle led the league in fewest points allowed, yards allowed, turnovers forced, and interceptions, then didn’t surrender more than 17 points in any of its three playoff games. That group was elite at every level, from the defensive line on back, just as the Eagles defense has been this season. But the secret to each unit’s excellence was the same: the secondary.

Marshawn Lynch did not have the kind of season in 2013 that Barkley is having. (There’s a case to be made that no one has.) But Lynch did rush for 1,257 yards and a league-high 12 touchdowns. He was the walking, talking, tackle-breaking embodiment of the Seahawks’ identity on offense. Barkley, with his ability to turn any touch into a touchdown, is a haymaking right hook. Lynch was a left jab from a fighter who filled his gloves with rocks.

Stylistically, Hurts and circa-2013 Russell Wilson are pretty similar. Each is mobile. Each is capable of creating big plays. Each can throw a beautiful deep ball. The more relevant similarity, though, might be this: Both the Eagles and Seahawks set up guardrails to limit their quarterbacks’ influence on their offenses. No team threw the ball less often during the 2024 regular season than the Eagles did. Just one team threw the ball less often during the 2013 regular season than the Seahawks did.

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In three postseason games, including Seattle’s 43-8 romp over the Denver Broncos in Super Bowl XLVIII, Wilson threw just 68 times and never eclipsed 215 passing yards against any opponent. But he also committed just one turnover. The demand that the Seahawks made of him was the same one that the Eagles are making of Hurts: You don’t have to win us the game. Just don’t lose it. That formula worked 11 years ago. The Eagles’ challenge is to prove it still does.