The first quarter of the NFL season is officially kaput. In the books. Finito.
Four of sixteen regular season games are recorded in the annals of history, and the Eagles have definitively shown us....
Little. The 2019 season’s first four games matter slightly more than the NFL’s now-completely-useless preseason week 3 games. Yes, when they’re all added up at the end of December, the Lions loss may haunt us; we may miss home field because of it. But listen— big picture, this team is sort of nameless and faceless at this point. A work in progress that will take shape in the month of October.
Think about the current notion/trend that Bill Bellichick “lets” the New England Patriots lose in September. He “works through stuff”, tries things. Experiments.
Hoodie McGrumpypants, the brainiac genius himself, seems willing to lose early in the year so that his teams can find the right pieces that work.
That said, it’s not great for the rest of the NFL that the Patriots are 4-0.
And here the Eagles sit at 2-2. Some are panicked. Most fans feel like we’re headed in the right direction with what the team showed in Green Bay. Public service announcement— it is still very early.
My case in point: I played on a Super Bowl team that lost every game in the “2nd quarter” of our sixteen-game journey in 2002.
The ‘02 Raiders were old and talented. We were the darlings of the league at this juncture of the year, because we’d started the year undefeated. 4-0, headed into the second week of October.
Then we stunk. We lost two games in overtime to even our record at 4-4 by November 3rd. We were labeled dysfunctional and elderly. Our offense “had no identity”, as we struggled to find a run/pass sweet spot. Defensively, we just couldn’t make the key stops. Jerry Rice turned 40. Rich Gannon was going to turn 37 in December.
So at the midway point of the season, we’d lost as often as we’d won— and it’d felt like forever since anyone watching in the stands had felt like a winner. We were “average” at halftime of the seasonal quarter system.
We knew we weren’t average. We traveled to Mile High for Monday Night Football and Rich Gannon completed 21 passes in a row to set a new NFL record and we stomped the Broncos 34-10. We ended up finishing the season 4-0 and 3-1, per the quarter system, winning those 7 games by an average of more than 16 points. We were home for the AFC Championship.
I guess my point is, we know this Eagles team is better than their 2-2 record suggests, and the NFL season always equalizes eventually. I think we’ll start to see that this week with the Eagles.
Fletcher Cox and Nigel Bradham will play like Fletcher and Nigel. Our defensive ends will finally get QBs tackled when the secondary holds up a half-second longer. Carson Wentz WILL separate himself from all the other QBs not in the tip-top tier. The Eagles will run the ball almost as often as they throw it and the o-line will feast.
Yes, of course the team would be better-off, had they beaten the Falcons and won the Lions game; and many are up in arms about the upcoming three-week road trip: Vikings, Cowboys, Bills. Should be rough. But should the Eagles struggle and win just one of those away battles after beating a hyper-abysmal Jets team, they’ll sit 4-4. In my mind, that is an absolute, bottom-of-the-barrel, worst-case scenario. But as my own history suggest, 4-4 wouldn’t be the end of the world.
Add Jalen Ramsey and that hypothetical 4-4 turns into 6-2, by the way. Just sayin’.