Another Eagles team is poised for a Super Bowl run thanks to the things that haven’t changed

The Eagles don’t make a whole lot of sense. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. But it is a thing. Since we have a week to kill, why don’t we think about that thing?

It’s been more than two decades since an organization won two conference championships in a span of six years with two different head coaches and two different starting quarterbacks. During that stretch, we’ve seen the Giants win two Super Bowls with Tom Coughlin and Eli Manning, and we’ve seen the Broncos appear in two Super Bowls in three years with Peyton Manning quarterbacking and John Fox and Gary Kubiak as head coaches. We’ve also seen way too much of Bill Belichick and Tom Brady. But the thing that the Eagles are currently favored to do is an uncommon feat (last accomplished, it so happens, by Belichick, Brady, and predecessors Bill Parcells and Drew Bledsoe).

On Sunday, in the wake of a 22-16 win over the Giants that clinched their second No. 1 seed in five years and their sixth in Jeffrey Lurie’s 29 years as owner, Jason Kelce stood at his locker and marveled at general manager Howie Roseman’s ability to cobble together another potential 2017.

“For as maligned as he has been in certain years, I have not seen a general manager be able to move on and manipulate and change up rosters and coaches like he has,” Kelce said. “That’s one thing that he’s been phenomenal at.”

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I’d asked Kelce to make some sense of the Eagles’ process over the years. The last decade has been a tumultuous one. Three coaches fired. Two starting quarterbacks traded. A Super Bowl victory surrounded by a bunch of mediocre seasons. And, yet, here they are, back again, 14-3 and the odds-on favorite to win another NFC crown.

My first thought was to credit Lurie’s ability to identify head coaching talent. In Nick Sirianni, the Eagles owner has a second straight second-year coach who claimed a No. 1 seed with a quarterback in his second year of starting. Like Doug Pederson before him, and Andy Reid before him, Lurie has found himself another coach who has outkicked his resumé. It seems notable that all three of those coaches are currently in the playoffs.

My second thought was Kelce’s. As one of those longtime Roseman critics whom Kelce referenced, I’ve finally come around to viewing Roseman as one of the league’s more competent general managers. Few executives in the NFL have as keen an understanding of value as Roseman. We saw it with the Sam Bradford and Timmy Jernigan trades in 2017. We’ve seen it with A.J. Brown, C.J. Gardner-Johnson, and James Bradberry in 2022. Six years after he orchestrated a two-year makeover of Chip Kelly’s roster, Roseman has done it again. Only seven players remain from that 2017 Super Bowl team, one of them the kicker, another the long-snapper.

Those seven players are my third thought. Specifically, the five non-specialists. Kelce, Lane Johnson, Brandon Graham, Fletcher Cox, Isaac Seumalo. Think about the positions they play. Think about their roles on this year’s team.

The game is won in the trenches. It’s something that Joe Banner taught to Roseman and Reid taught to Pederson. It’s something Sirianni has long understood as the son of a coach. More often than not, the game comes down to the team that makes blocks or the team that blows them up.

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For all of the turnover that the Eagles have seen since Reid’s final years at the helm, the most important positions in football have been their most consistent. Together, Kelce, Johnson, Graham, and Cox account for 17 Pro Bowl and six All-Pro selections. All were drafted in a four-year stretch. Three of them date back to Reid.

That’s the answer, right there. That’s the common thread. The coaches, the quarterbacks, the general manager — they stand on the shoulders of giants. This is particularly true on the offensive side of the ball. Take Johnson and Kelce, for instance. Since 2012, the Eagles have run 11,921 offensive plays. With five offensive linemen on the field for each play, that’s a total of 59,605 potential snaps. Combined, Kelce and Johnson have accounted for 19,331 of those snaps. That’s 32.7%, nearly a third.

Roseman deserves plenty of credit for the roster he has built this season. Sirianni deserves as much if not more for the way he has dispatched the players at his disposal. Same goes for Jalen Hurts, the same way it did for Carson Wentz during the 2017 regular season. Coach of the year, executive of the year, MVP — it should be a clean sweep. But the foundation of it all is the offensive line.

That, right there, is the Eagles Doctrine. It’s the common thread, the tie that binds. The biggest question of the postseason might not be Sirianni or Hurts or Jonathan Gannon, but whether Johnson is healthy.

“One thing I can say, that I will say, is that fundamentals are going to be a big part of winning in the playoffs,” Sirianni said on Wednesday. “Just like we believe it really is in the regular season, as well, right? Fundamentals. This player is a good player, that player is a good player, this coach is going to call a good play, that coach is going to call a good play. What it comes down to is your fundamentals.”

For all of their missteps over the years, the Eagles are where they are because of their understanding of fundamentals. Give your guys room to run and time to throw and disrupt your opponent’s ability to do the same. The Eagles have seen a remarkable number of variables change since 2017. That’s a testament to the constants.

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