Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
Cowboys spoil Eagles’ Sunday night party with 27-20 victory at Lincoln Financial Field
WEEK OFF CAN’T SAVE BIRDS AS PLAYOFF HOPES BEGIN TO VANISH Suddenly, Eagles seem to be running out of time
PHILADELPHIA >> The values of winning a Super Bowl were many, from parades to bonus checks to a trophy in Jeffrey Lurie’s office. The curse, if there was one, has been affecting the Eagles’ season for a while.
Always, they kept telling themselves, there would be time later to do it again.
Always, there would be that moment when all it will take is to successfully run fourth-down plays, to throw touchdown passes to quarterbacks, to wait for Hall of Fame receivers to fail to catch would-be gamewinning touchdown passes in the final moments of playoff games.
Always, there would be opportunities.
By Sunday night, when they lost, 27-20, to the Dallas Cowboys, it didn’t seem that way anymore. By then, they were a third-place team that had lost two of its last three and four of its last six. By then, they were in severe peril of wasting the first chance they had since 1961 to return to a postseason and try to defend a championship. For them, it’s been a long season. Suddenly, though, it’s one that seems way too short.
The Eagles didn’t necessarily publicly declare their belief that they could just turn whatever it was back on that allowed them to be what they were last season. They tried to put the Super Bowl behind. They voted to drag a championship montage out of their locker room. They said the right things, most of the time.
But they were champions. They knew they were champions. And they always felt they would have time to show why. Once, twice, more times probably, Doug Pederson referenced the oddity of the Eagles’ schedule, and how it saved so many NFC East opportunities for November and later. Most recently, he hummed out that familiar theme after a tight win over the Jaguars and a return flight from London.
“We know our division,” he said. “We have five division games in the next eight weeks, so that’s a challenge.
“But everything is right in front of us.”
The season literally was half over. The Eagles, their championship swagger showing, acted as if it were just beginning. And those were their prevailing thoughts: When it mattered, all they would need to do was stomp through the NFC East and win its automatic playoff bid. From there, they would have the chance to squeeze through the playoffs, if necessary with their second-string quarterback.
They hinted at that after losing two of their first four games. They said as much, some of them, after a loss at home to Carolina. And Pederson kept it up last week, knowing the Cowboys would be in the Linc Sunday night, likely aware that the Eagles would be favored.
“You can look down the road a little bit and kind of break it up, the next four weeks and the last four weeks and then see exactly what’s in front of us,” Pederson said. “But we always focus on a one-week-at-a-time mentality. We talk about winning our division opponent games, and this is one of those that you try to win.
“When you say things are right in front of you, it’s kind of right there for this football team to go attack and try to capture. I just remind them each and every day of that.”
By the time they finished their pregame hockey scrum, shook hands with Veterans Day guest coin-flipper former president George W. Bush, and finally confronted the Cowboys, the Birds were a game and a half behind the Redskins in the NFC East. That was after Washington won, 16-3, earlier in Tampa. They were also just a game ahead of the Cowboys. All of which meant, were they to lose, they would flutter into the NFC East’s three-hole, if only under the glow of the head-to-head asterisk.
That meant they were in a critical spot. Suddenly, all that wiggle room they truly believed was to their benefit was threatening them with claustrophobia.
They may not have been ready to admit it: But they were quickly running out of time.
Though it could have been a natural reverberation of taking the last week off for their bye, the Eagles played as if nervous. Plays that normally would make, they instead flubbed. Carson Wentz’s third pass of the game was intercepted by Leighton Vander Esch, ultimately leading to a Dallas field goal. Later in the first quarter, Kamu Grugier-Hill dropped a would-be interception deep in Cowboys territory.
All night, the Eagles allowed a division opponent that many had assumed to be too woozy to avoid being knocked out to creep into scoring range. At one point, Ezekiel Elliott assured that himself by leaping over Tre Sullivan as if he were a track-meet hurdle.
The Eagles did not go easily Sunday. Twice in the fourth quarter, they tied the game with Carson Wentz scoring passes to Zach Ertz. Both times, though, Dallas immediately responded with a touchdown drive of its own. Yet, as per the season-long theme, there would be time. And Wentz twice had enough of it to drive them into scoring range, only to fizzle with 1:09 left, then again as time expired.
The Eagles’ season is not over. There are seven games to play, not one. Yet that schedule, which even as recently as last week seemed so inviting, instead seems haunting. They still must play in New Orleans and in Los Angeles against the Rams. And those five division games Pederson had so easily thrown around like celebratory confetti? There are only four left. And one of them will be in Dallas, against a team that played Sunday as if desperate.
The Eagles, cursed by that championship, played nothing like that, nothing like that at all.