Did you catch the Eagles-Colts royal rumble Tuesday? Yeah. Yawn. Big deal.

It was an ugly scene, sure, but this sort of thing was much more common years ago. Plus, it's football. It's gonna happen.

Eagles QB Jalen Hurts stands behind head coach Nick Sirianni during a joint practice with the Colts on Tuesday.Read moreHeather Khalifa / Staff Photographer

by Mike Sielski | Columnist

Published Aug. 22, 2023, 5:38 p.m. ET

It’s football. Nakobe Dean wanted everyone to understand that about the brawl between the Eagles and Colts that had taken place minutes earlier. Late Tuesday morning at the NovaCare Complex. Temperatures climbing into the 80s. Last day of training camp. Derek Barnett karate-chops down on Anthony Richardson’s arm after a play had ended. Zaire Franklin gives Kenny Gainwell a little extra what-for after the whistle. Jason Kelce zooms in and, in the name of standing up for his teammate, plows over Franklin. And there they go, giant men wearing green charging after giant men wearing blue. All that was missing was Mel Gibson atop a horse screaming, “FREEDOM!”

Hey, it’s football. Right, Nakobe?

“It’s football,” said Dean, the Eagles’ starting middle linebacker. “A lot of alpha males on the field. It’s football. It’s just born out of being football. It’s camp time. Hard practices on the field. That’s what we do. One of our core values is connection. We connect as a team. At the same time, it’s football. We’re just out here playing ball, and emotions got the better of everybody.”

So was the brawl a good thing or a bad thing?

“It’s football,” he said. “It’s just a thing that happens during football.”

It was funny, genuinely funny, the way Dean kept repeating those two words to answer any and every question about the royal rumble. Sure, it was an easy tactic to prevent himself from giving too many details and going into too much depth about what was a fairly ugly scene, but it also had the benefit of being right. It’s football. It’s training camp. There are going to be fights — now 18 of them this summer around the NFL, according to NBC Los Angeles, which is taking the time and effort to count.

Good thing that NBC L.A. is tallying up all those brouhahas now and not, say, 25 or 30 years ago. Back then, it would have taken a lot more time and effort to keep a brawl catalog, and not just because there was no social media to allow us to record, post, and watch video and photographs of these skirmishes. Back then, training-camp practices were longer and harder, and fights were more frequent and intense — even between or among teammates — than they are now. Hell, there were coaches who wanted their players to fight, who pitted individuals and positions against each other. Does the name Buddy Ryan mean anything to you?

Former Eagles defensive lineman Mike Golic, who played for the team from 1987 through 1992, once described a fight that happened between offensive tackle Ron Heller and defensive tackle Jerome Brown that started on the field and carried over into the locker room shower, where Heller dropped his towel, assumed a boxer’s stance, and asked Brown, You wanna go now?

“There was literally a fight after every single one-on-one rep by all of us — late pushing, late grabbing, late punching, everybody jumping in on everybody,” Golic said during a 2021 interview on 94.1 WIP. “I mean, it got to the point, in all honesty, where we were getting nothing accomplished. But what the hell? We were fighting. We didn’t give a damn.”

Today’s coaches and teams do give a damn. They want to get something accomplished at practice, and they want it to get accomplished as quickly, with as little muss and fuss, as possible. The Eagles’ entire practice schedule is based on Nick Sirianni’s desire to be efficient, to maximize the time that the team spends on the field. Even Jalen Hurts seemed annoyed that the melee had compelled Sirianni and Colts head coach (and former Eagles offensive coordinator) Shane Steichen to end the workout prematurely.

“That’s what I get paid to do — to play football,” Hurts said. “I want to practice.”

No wonder. Joint practices, like Tuesday’s, are all the rage around the NFL. The sessions simulate in-game performance and intensity without the prying eyes of live TV cameras around. Players on the league’s margins like preseason games because they get the opportunity to show their stuff to 31 other potential employers. Coaches love joint practices because they don’t have to worry as much about opening their playbooks for the world to see.

But the risk with joint practices manifested itself Tuesday. Brawls and fights are rare during preseason and regular-season games for the obvious reasons: Players don’t want to damage either their chances of making a roster or their teams’ chances of winning a game that matters. They don’t want to do something dumb or undisciplined that leads to a penalty or ejection. During practice, those disincentives aren’t nearly so strong.

“In practice, you have more time to process things, and you have more opportunities for your temper [to flare] and for you to get in your own head about things,” Kelce said, “whereas in a game, you’re on to the next play. You’ve got to get the play in the huddle. You’ve got to go to the sideline. You’ve got to make corrections. There’s a little bit more time to take things personal in practice.”

Which is what happened Tuesday. It was a big deal in the moment. It made for some great tweets. But most of all, like Nakobe Dean told everyone again and again, it was just football.