Surprise! ... Birds not surprised by start

The more Jason Kelce tried to ignore the noise, it more it continued to crackle, jarring his professional sensibilities, challenging his confidence.

All late last winter, through the spring and into the summer, it was there, whenever he turned on a radio, crinkled open a newspaper, swept down on his smartphone. It was consistent. It was restless. And to him, it was puzzling.

The Eagles. They were going to struggle. No, they were going to be embarrassed. They were inept, a dumpster fire, doomed to regret spending what would be a high No. 1 draft choice on Carson Wentz.

Yet he was seeing something else.

“You just look around the locker room,” Kelce said. “And if you’ve been around the league for a while, you can tell when you have good players and a good team. We get plays for the week and you kind of look at them and you say, ‘This looks like a great play; I can see this working out very well.’ And I think even in the offseason, just looking at the roster we had, I think we were very underrated in the media’s eye.

“Honestly, it seems our team always does better when the media doesn’t expect us to do well.”

It was at that moment Sunday night, after the Eagles’ 34-3 victory over the Pittsburgh Steelers, that the Birds’ center realized the irony.

“So,” he said, shrugging, “I was a little bit happy. I guess.”

Such was the mood around the NovaCare Complex, particularly when no one else was looking. The Eagles were convinced they were a good football team with a good coach and enough quarterbacks to succeed. Their 3-0 start says they were correct. But why were so many so convinced that disaster was their destiny? They were 7-9 last season, not 1-15. They won 10 games the previous year. They shedded the amateurish Chip Kelly. They upgraded defensive coordinators. They returned to an attacking, 4-3 defense.

Early, the Eagles were to be led by Sam Bradford, who was excellent late last season. As it would happen, he’d be traded. But his presence in camp was of some value to Carson Wentz when an eleventh-hour barrage of draft picks came Howie Roseman’s way from Minnesota. By then, Wentz was ready. And as a No. 2 overall pick in a draft, he should have been ready. So his strong start should not have been a surprise, either.

The Eagles had made some changes, mostly exchanging useless players for value. And through the OTAs and whatever other decoder-ring-initial workouts they were having, they knew: They had a pretty good football team.

But this good? Thirty-one points a game good? No turnovers all season good? Low-penalty, high-execution good? Already?

“To be honest with you, I didn’t really know,” Connor Barwin said. “I thought we were talented. I really felt that we had a good team, a good group of guys that all liked playing with each other. But all through the summer and OTAs, you don’t really know until you go out and play.

“So far, we have been playing together as a team. We’ve been pretty disciplined, played smart and played hard.”

Las Vegas said the Eagles would win around seven games. If the Eagles go 4-9 the rest of the way, they will hit that number. If they go 6-7, they will finish 9-7, a customary cut-off point for the postseason. They Eagles quarterback Carson Wentz sets the offense during Sunday’s game with the Steelers.

are in good shape, leading the NFC East. They have yet to play a division game, let alone a division opponent for a second time. So the challenges will grow. They know that. So they are doing the expected, which is to smile in the locker room, but not celebrate.

“I think everyone around here is confident,” Wentz said. “We knew we had the ability. But we had to keep chopping away. That’s kind of a motto we have. And we have done a good job with it.”

The Eagles won’t play for another two weeks. That will allow the new narrative to marinate. By the time they resurface Oct. 9 in Detroit, they will be re-cast as the big, bad Eagles, the team with the suffocating defense, with a superstar-elect quarterback, virtually unbeatable. That will be as odd and as

wrong as the preseason warnings of doom.

But Wentz has shown enough brilliance in three games, including a scrambling, 73-yard, pass-run touchdown connection with Darren Sproles that will be tough to beat as his No. 1 rookie-season highlight, to project greatness. And the defense, particularly in the secondary, has been alert and aggressive, smothering receivers, batting down passes, giving Jim Schwartz’s hungry pass-rushers time to surround quarterbacks.

Through two weeks, the Birds had looked spectacular. One constant gripe from the everpessimistic crowd, though, was that they’d only played the Browns and Bears, two teams projected to fail. But that was a gifted Steelers team they overwhelmed Sunday.

“They out-coached us,” Pitts-

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burgh coach Mike Tomlin said. “They out-played us. They were better fundamentally. “I tip my hat to those guys.” The Eagles will not, cannot be as dominating as they’ve been in Doug Pederson’s 7-0 start, preseason included. Opposing defensive coordinators make too much money to continue to be stumped by a rookie quarterback. They will figure something out. But that will require more work than anyone expected. Almost anyone, at least. “I don’t get into the whole expectation thing,” Jason Kelce said. “I go in each and every week thinking that we are going to win. That’s the mindset you have to have as an NFL player. But I think this is what everybody here fully expected.”

No matter how scratchy the noise.