With all the similarities between the 2023 Philadelphia Eagles and the 2025 squad, it’s only fair to suggest that this team is on a similar pace.
The Eagles were expected to be a very good team that year, sitting at 10-1 before an epic collapse in the second half of the season.
Advertisement
Similar to the Eagles now, it feels like a lot more is wrong than we even know about.
Despite that reality, many players are still suggesting it isn’t the case, and in some sense, that’s fair.
For someone like Saquon Barkley, who wasn’t even on the team that year and instead was a beneficiary of it while playing for the New York Giants in the same division, he isn’t exactly thrilled when people suggest the situations are remotely the same.
“A lot of people bring up 2023,” Barkley said, per The Athletic. “I wasn’t here. A lot of guys weren’t here. And the guys who were here would be crazy not to learn from that. It may not make sense right now. … It doesn’t make sense to me.”
Advertisement
While I understand what Barkley is trying to say, at the end of the day, even if there aren’t true similarities, there’s one big one: the Eagles are losing games they shouldn’t lose.
They did the same exact thing in 2023, and as a result, they were bounced early in the playoffs. Even if the Eagles are playing slightly better now than they were at that point, the process still feels poor.
Players can continue to come out and suggest that not everything is wrong.
Advertisement
Maybe nothing is wrong, and they just aren’t playing good football.
But ultimately, the goal in the NFL is to win games, and the Eagles haven’t done that at a competent enough level to suggest that anything is truly different from what we saw a few years ago.
“Nah — this ain’t no crash at the end,” said Brandon Graham. “It’s just the way it’s going right now. We’ll get it right. I’m not worried at all. We’ve still got Vic. Back then, we lost (coordinators) on both sides of the ball.”