The Philadelphia Eagles and the Power of Fuck You

Go birds, and go to hell everyone else.

The 2024 Philadelphia Eagles were a living monument to Fuck You.

A.J. Brown is a fuck you to the Tennessee Titans, who traded away their only wideout with multiple 1,000 yard seasons since Derrick Mason because being cheap was more appealing than being good.

Mekhi Becton is a fuck you to the New York Jets, a franchise that ruins everything it breathes on, who drafted Becton with the 11th pick in 2020. They watched the Eagles sign Becton this offseason, move him to guard, and lean on him and the rest of the offensive line all the way to a championship; stories about Becton today now read much like those of a child rescued from a dangerously unsecured quarry, only that quarry is an NFL franchise.

DeVonta Smith, Cooper DeJean, and Jalen Carter are all, in a winding enough way, a fuck you to the Indianapolis Colts, who agreed to a trade for Carson Wentz that included a conditional draft pick back to the Eagles. On Christmas Day of 2021, the Colts hit the triggers that boosted that pick from a second rounder to a first round selection – and then lost their last two games, including the season finale against the same Jacksonville Jaguars that fired Urban Meyer midseason, to miss the playoffs completely.

Zack Baun? He’s a fuck you to the New Orleans Saints, who took him with a third round selection in 2020 and used him to no meaningful effect. In one season with the Eagles, Baun finished with 94 solo tackles and 2.5 sacks. In four years with the Saints, Baun tallied 60 solo tackles and two sacks.

Offensive coordinator Kellen Moore, who’s probably going to be the next head coach of the Saints, is a fuck you to the Dallas Cowboys, who let go of Moore after the 2022 season. Actually, add quarterbacks coach Doug Nussmeier to this entry; he also got canned by Dallas after ‘22, and both wound up joining Philadelphia in the same role two years later. In their two matchups this year (there was not a third because that would have required, at a minimum, the Cowboys to have made the playoffs), the Eagles scored eight offensive touchdowns.

Dallas managed one.

Washington picked Jahan Dotson 16th overall in the 2022 Draft. Two years later, they traded him to the Eagles for what basically amounts to a third rounder. Did Dotson put up gaudy numbers for Philadelphia? No, not really. Did he accumulate more yardage in a Super Bowl than every Washington player combined from the 1992 season through today? Yes, he did, and that’s a fuck you to Washington.

Ok, I’m going to admit that this one is a little unnecessary, but: Kenny Pickett seeing playing time in a Super Bowl win is a fuck you to the Pittsburgh Steelers, who last won a playoff game when Barack Obama was President of the United States.

Nick Sirianni is a fuck you to, well, Eagles fans, so many of whom wanted his ass thrown out after the 2023 season. Is it spoiled to feel that way after an 11-6 season? I am not an objective commenter on the matter, though I can tell you when those losses include a 23-point home pulverizing by the 49ers, blowing a two-score lead to the fucking Cardinals in Week 17, a remarkably uncompetitive Wild Card loss to the Bucs, and “the first time your franchise ever lost to the New York Jets,” it doesn’t seem entirely irrational.

Here’s the weird thing about this Super Bowl, as explained by an esteemed member of the Online Eagles Community:

In chronological order, here are wins from the 2024 regular season that required an immense amount of late-game Eagles stress:

Week 1 against Green Bay
Week 3 against New Orleans
Week 6 against Cleveland
Week 9 against Jacksonville
Week 11 against Washington
Week 14 against Carolina

Look at some of the opponents on that list! You’re telling me the same team that barely escaped the garbage heap SAINTS and JAGUARS and BROWNS just threw the two-time defending Super Bowl champions around the field like mattresses being ejected from a bedbug-riddled dorm???

But it’s true. Nick Sirianni, the subject of so much ire and frustration, enjoyed a Gatorade shower with nearly three minutes left to play in the Super Bowl. What an absolute fuck you to me and everyone else who trashed this man. (And will trash him again as early as Week 5 next season.)

Last, and certainly not least: No fuck you is more open and pronounced than the New York Giants letting Saquon Barkley sign with the Eagles, become the ninth player in league history to run for 2000 yards, tear up the first three teams Philadelphia faced in the playoffs, and then win a Super Bowl. The video of the Giants making this fatefully terrible decision lives on their own NFL website!

My friend Rodger Sherman makes a convincing case that Barkley never could have achieved this kind of season with the Giants in their current form. That Rodger is right, however, does not make this less of a fuck you, and it may in fact make it more of one; the failure of this team to properly build an infrastructure around a running back capable of this kind of season should create a deep and enduring sense of shame.

What a tidy story that would make for this year’s Super Bowl champions, a team built on the mistakes and poor judgment of their competition. Thank you for your contributions, other NFL franchises. The Eagles couldn’t have done this without your dumb asses.

Still, that story would miss several elements. There’s the rest of the offensive line, a triumph of scouting and coaching bookended by one first-round pick from Oklahoma and one seventh-round pick from Australian rugby.

There’s the secondary, which features two rookies prominently. One of them, Quinyon Mitchell, didn’t allow a receiving touchdown until Week 16 despite spending more than 500 snaps in coverage.

There’s the decision to Just Draft A Lot of Georgia Defenders, which, well, yeah, that’s been pretty effective.

And then there’s the Super Bowl MVP, Jalen Hurts.

Photo by Mathew Schwartz on Unsplash

Before the 2019 season, the Eagles signed Carson Wentz, the prize they’d traded up to select three years earlier, to a pricy extension. Philadelphia struggled over stretches but rallied to win their final four regular season games and claim the NFC East title. On the second drive of their Wild Card game at home against the Seahawks, Wentz was forced out of the game with a head injury, and the offense never managed a touchdown in a 17-9 loss.

But Wentz had put together decent enough numbers that year, and he’d played all 16 games. Combined with the financial commitment the Eagles had made to him, it made for a notable surprise when the team used their second round pick in 2020 on Hurts.

The marquee quarterbacks – Burrow, Tua, and Herbert – had gone far earlier, off the board before the seventh overall pick could be made. The collective understanding seemed to be that Hurts had the physical traits for the Eagles to build a package around him, to serve as a sort of absurdly strong Taysom Hill to complement the core offense resting on Wentz.

Friends, that is not how the 2020 season played out in the slightest. The Eagles spent zero days above .500 en route to a 4-11-1 record, Wentz was benched after Week 13, and the final game of the year turned into a complete meltdown.

Facing the Washington Football Team (ah, simpler times), Hurts struggled mightily as a passer through three quarters, with seven completions on 20 attempts for 72 yards and a pick. He’d scored twice on the ground, though, and the Eagles entered the final quarter down three points.

When the offense took the field for their first drive of that quarter, Hurts was not with them. Nor was Wentz, who was a healthy scratch. Doug Pederson, the winner of the only Eagles Super Bowl at the time, sent out Nate Sudfeld, a fourth-year player who had appeared in three games total to that point.

Sudfeld turned the ball over twice in his first five snaps, the Eagles lost and improved their 2021 draft position by three spots, and the Giants missed the playoffs thanks to Washington’s win. Professional TV screamers spent the next day livid at Pederson, accusing him of being a traitor to football.

Within two weeks, the Eagles fired Pederson. About a month after that, they traded Wentz to the Colts.

This is where the last fuck you could have come in and wiped away all the others. Thanks to that loss to the Football Team, Philadelphia held the sixth pick in a draft where five quarterbacks wound up selected in the first round. After some shuffling, the Eagles picked a wide receiver, DeVonta Smith, as a weapon for Hurts.

As a fun reminder, this is what that looked like in the Super Bowl.

But 2021, the first full year of Hurts as the starter, was a much more mixed bag. He opened the year completing 77% of his throws and tossing three scores as the Eagles destroyed the Falcons. He also went 14 of 31 for 129 yards and threw three interceptions in a Week 12 loss to the Giants.

Though the Eagles made it back to the playoffs, Hurts looked largely overmatched against the Bucs. Philadelphia finished the season winning nine of his 16 starts, and the Fuck You Eagles window opened again.

And, frankly, the team might have been lucky to have been saved from an alternative path that offseason.

An exceptionally thin draft class at quarterback only saw one player at that position picked in the first two rounds. (Kenny Pickett, who, again, is a Super Bowl champion.) That absence of temptation allowed the Eagles to use one of their three first rounders in the trade for A.J. Brown, one to pick defensive tackle Jordan Davis, and trade the third to the Saints for additional future draft capital.

Turns out Philadelphia also attempted to acquire two veteran quarterbacks via trade that offseason. They lined up a deal with the Seahawks for Russell Wilson, but Wilson vetoed that before accepting a trade to the Broncos, a thing we all remember as going exceptionally well. Philly also tried to get into the bidding for Deshaun Watson, who similarly cut the Eagles from his possible trade destinations.

The Eagles are rightly lauded for the cleverness of the front office and, at the same time, these are each moves that would have set the franchise back for years, both from a football standpoint and the other from a “don’t be the absolute worst” one.

And yet, all those fuck you moves up above don’t work without Jalen Hurts becoming the quarterback he is now. Brown and Smith become talented receivers wasted in an offense that can’t get them the ball. Baun, DeJean, and Carter form a defense that pulls more than its weight only to see the offense fail to capitalize. Becton helps retrench an offensive line that gets space for Barkley – which doesn’t matter because defenses don’t respect Philadelphia’s passing game. Sirianni is the asshole who either hasn’t helped Hurts improve or can’t find a better alternative.

Jalen Hurts has remained very upfront about the value he sees in external doubt and criticism.

That’s pretty standard athlete mindset, and technically, yes, this win is a Fuck You to all those people as well.

But I think I’m most amazed at how much of a Fuck You the arc of Jalen Hurts is to the idea of having a plan at all. Kellen Moore is the fourth offensive coordinator Hurts has had in five years. He was brought in as a side dish for a main course quarterback who was shipped out within a year. His team has both built around him and tried to move on from him.

And, at least publicly, he’s been eerily calm about the whole thing, even after beating the team that snatched the Lombardi Trophy from him two years ago. That, in the end, is the coolest Fuck You of all.