The Deafening Quiet Of An Eagles Victory

Chirp, Chirp

So it's the day after a season-saving win at home for the Eagles, who trucked the Saints by a massive margin. Washington and Dallas lost, the Giants nearly lost at home while a massive favorite against the Niners, and suffered injuries to boot, especially at WR. There's a reasonable chance that the team could be playing for first place in the division on Monday night, at home, against wounded rivals. Oh, and the only new Eagle of note with an injury after the Saints game was WR Nelson Agholor, who wasn't exactly setting the world on fire anyway. This should be the time when Happy Eagle Fan blinks in the daylight and fills up the phone lines and Web sites with enthusiasm, no?

Well, no. Because that would involve ridiculous amounts of obliviousness, and the fan base is smart enough to realize that beating a terrible team, in the grand scale of things, doesn't matter very much. Just because the division is a dumpster fire now doesn't mean it will be later, and winning a dumpster fire so you can get trucked by a real team in the playoffs would be, well, the apex of the franchise for most of the last decade. Remember, no playoff wins during the Obama Administration. Wee bit of scar tissue about that.

But there's more to it than that, really. The Eagles have won their two games this year with, more than anything else, defense... and no one really thinks that, with the possible exception of Seattle, truly great teams win with defense as a cornerstone now. The NFL is an offensive league on many levels, not the least of which is the fact that teams that make the playoffs without a stud QB do not win games, not even at home. And no one has been fooled, even during his hot second half against Atlanta, Washington and New Orleans, into thinking that Sam Bradford is going to ever be a stud QB. Hell, there hasn't been a game yet this year when we haven't had to fight off the urge to wonder if Mark Sanchez should get a series.

No one I know, by the way, really wants to be in the situation of not being able to just root for the damned team. We'd all be much happier talking about how great Fletcher Cox is, how Malcolm Jenkins is playing out of his mind, that Jordan Hicks has been a tackling machine, and so on, and so on. Crapping on the guys in your laundry is never fun, especially when you are dealing with something like the NFL, where you wait eight months to see, honestly, a trivial amount of actual game play. (If there are, as has been commonly summarized, about 11 minutes of actual action during an NFL game, the Eagles actually play for about three hours per year. No wonder everyone is incapable of ignoring the damned games.)

But, well, we *know* we're being sold a bill of goods. We know how this ends. We know that some college is eventually going to float Nero Kelly a monster of a check to go back and do the thing that he's actually good at, and that he's going to get tired of having people say he's not a genius., or losing 5-6X more games a year than he would with Slave Ball. He's also not going to be able to just choose the Not Uppity at some point, because the number of guys who are good enough to make the NFL without a trace of the Uppity is a very small Venn diagram.

The time to say such things? Well, it's not after a massive win. After a massive win, you just want to go back to your lifelong mental pattern of hope over experience, and enjoy it.

And if you have no shame, you get to do that.

But if you do?

Mighty loud crickets around here.