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Photograph: Phelan M Ebenhack/AP
It’s long been said the NFL stands for Not For Long. Change comes quickly in a copycat league where winning strategies are examined, analyzed and imitated and constant innovation is central to continued success. But even by that standard, it’s difficult to recall a more rapid fall from grace than what’s gone down with the Philadelphia Eagles over the past two months.
The Eagles were the envy of the league as recently as seven weeks ago, a winning machine fronted by an energetic young coach, ascendant franchise quarterback and one of football’s most talented rosters from top to bottom. After romping to last year’s NFC championship and coming up three points short of winning the Super Bowl, they’d raced out to the NFL’s best record at Thanksgiving and appeared on course for a return trip to the sport’s biggest stage.
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But from that 10-1 start, the Eagles came undone and limped into Monday night’s NFC wildcard playoff having dropped five of six games – a death spiral punctuated by blowout losses to the 3-12 Cardinals and 5-11 Giants. All of it came to a merciful, predictable end on a muggy Monday night at Raymond James Stadium, where they were dog-walked 32-9 by a mediocre Tampa Bay team they’d dominated in October – a horror-show scoreline that could have been far worse had the mistake-prone Buccaneers not dropped about a half-dozen passes. The Eagles couldn’t block. They couldn’t catch. They certainly couldn’t tackle. They were unprepared, unmotivated and uninterested. In a key sequence freighted with unmistakable metaphor, the Tush Push – their trademark short-yardage play once hailed as unstoppable – was stuffed at the goalline.
The Eagles have experienced their share of home-stretch faceplants in a nine-decade history filled with far more heartbreak than glory – 2014 under Chip Kelly, 1994 under Rich Kotite, 1981…
Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/nfl-never-seen-anything-quite-133941209.html
Author : The Guardian
Publish date : 2024-01-17 13:39:41
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