Good news for the Eagles: Their next two foes are the NFL’s latest, biggest embarrassments

Consider the Eagles’ next two opponents. And quit giggling.

First up, this Monday night, are the Washington Commanders, who are 4-5, which is the best thing anyone can say about them. At the moment, the Commanders are subjects of a criminal investigation by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Eastern District of Virginia for allegedly engaging in deceptive business practices. Those crooked practices presumably included any occasion that a team employee publicly referred to the Commanders as a “competent NFL franchise” or a “lovely and enlightened place to work.” The revelation came on the heels of a major investigative piece by ESPN reaffirming that the team’s owner, Daniel Snyder, might actually be the end result of a computer-reanimation experiment that combined the genes and personalities of Donald Trump, George Costanza, and Matt Lauer into a single sentient being: a paranoid, power-mad, skirt-peeking creep.

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Six days after facing Washington, the Eagles will head to Indianapolis to play the Colts, whose owner and CEO is Jim Irsay, who himself comes from a long line of NFL bosses who do dirty deeds after midnight. After the Colts lost Sunday to the New England Patriots, 26-3, to drop their record to 3-5-1, Irsay fired head coach (and former Eagles offensive coordinator) Frank Reich and hired, as Reich’s replacement, Jeff Saturday.

Saturday was the Colts’ starting center for 12 of his 14 NFL seasons, had more recently been analyzing the league for ESPN, and has never coached collegiate or professional football until now. His primary qualification for the job apparently was that Irsay thinks he’s a righteous dude, and his first move was to have Parks Frazier — a 30-year-old passing-game specialist/assistant quarterbacks coach for the Colts who has never called plays at any level of football — call plays at the highest level of football. These sharp and deliberative maneuvers are sure to turn around a franchise that has had a different starting quarterback in each of the last five seasons and has won one playoff game in the last eight years. A franchise whose owner last month called out Snyder for embarrassing the NFL. That Jim Irsay. Such exquisite timing and convenient courage.

Now, none of those recent developments means that the Eagles, who at 8-0 are the league’s last remaining unbeaten team, will have an easy time beating the Commanders and/or the Colts. They should and likely will win both of those games, of course, but this is still the NFL, a parity paradise. Washington, for instance, is probably better equipped to beat the Eagles now that Taylor Heinicke is starting at quarterback and Carson Wentz no longer is. (Every team with Wentz on its roster eventually reaches this point. The Commanders just got there sooner than the others.)

Even if the Eagles do manage to lose one or, heaven forbid, both of these upcoming games, though, they’ll still be in excellent shape both in the NFC standings and in their standing within the league. There have been and will be plenty of reasons to criticize the Eagles and their leadership. But when it comes to fulfilling the primary purposes of an NFL franchise — be consistently respectable or even excellent, don’t do much to embarrass yourself or your city or your fans — the Eagles fare pretty well relative to their counterparts.

“The people in the top seats are 100% committed to winning,” said Eagles defensive coordinator Jonathan Gannon, who had worked for five NFL teams before joining the Eagles last year. “Who I mean by that is the owner, the GM, and the head coach. When they’re in lockstep in that all they care about is, day by day, the process and winning football games, and not just short-term but long-term, you have a chance to do your job and do it well and win games.

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“I think a lot of people out there say, ‘Yeah, we want to win. We want to win. We want to win.’ But their actions don’t really show that. The actions in this building with the Philadelphia Eagles, those three guys, their actions every day, they’re committed to that. You couldn’t have a better defensive coordinator chair than I have right now for those three guys and the players that we have. I love it here.”

Surely Jeffrey Lurie, Howie Roseman, and Nick Sirianni will be tickled to hear such praise from Gannon. They might frame that quote and hang it on their office walls, though one of Gannon’s previous employers might not find it so insightful and appealing. Gannon spent three years on Reich’s staff with the Colts. If Gannon has any designs on becoming a head coach, he might have pushed his resumé to the bottom of the pile on Jim Irsay’s desk, far below the great Parks Frazier.