Exciting Mics podcast<\/a> with teammates Cooper DeJean and Reed Blankenship, and a few months removed from winning it all, he made a lofty observation about what his team had just accomplished.<\/p>\n\u201cI firmly believe when you look at our team,\u201d Barkley said, \u201cand we\u2019re not looking too far into the past\u2026 I think we\u2019re a top-five team of all-time.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you really look at the season after the first four games, it was belt to a–.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen you have the talent and the skill that we have on our team, mixed with the coaches\u2026 we all play together, how we played, teams really stood no chance. You see that in the playoffs. You see that in the Super Bowl. The [final] score was 40-twenty-something, but in reality, it wasn\u2019t really a game.\u201d<\/p>\n
What Barkley said was boastful, but he isn\u2019t that far off, when you consider the facts. After the team\u2019s Week 5 bye, it played 17 games. It went 16-1 in those games. To say the defense was dominant in that span may actually be an understatement.<\/p>\n
From Week 6 through the end of the regular season, the Eagles allowed a league-low 15.9 points per game. They allowed 251.5 yards a game, also best in the NFL \u2014 by 50 yards a game. They outscored their opponents, on average, by 13 points a game, including their three-point loss to the Commanders in Week 11. That loss was the only game after the bye in which they allowed more than 23 points, including all four playoff games.<\/p>\n
And Barkley himself? He rushed for 1,570 yards \u2014 after the bye. That\u2019s more than 22 entire NFL teams over those 13 weeks.<\/p>\n
And if you\u2019re talking about the Super Bowl? We could roll out statistics and facts galore, but just one paints a perfect portrait of the drubbing the Eagles handed one of the best quarterback-head coach duos in league history: With 2:33 left in the third quarter, and trailing 34-0, Kansas City crossed midfield for the first time.<\/p>\n
Perhaps time and perspective will hash out where the 2024 Eagles rank among the best of the best teams and seasons. But Barkley\u2019s evaluation is not without merit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When a team wins a Super Bowl, that\u2019s special. That\u2019s immortality. You are immediately among the best NFL…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":73178,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2068],"tags":[25,4904,7,6,242,109,2476],"class_list":{"0":"post-73177","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-philadelphia-eagles","8":"tag-eagles","9":"tag-eagles-blog","10":"tag-football","11":"tag-nfl","12":"tag-philadelphia","13":"tag-philadelphia-eagles","14":"tag-philadelphiaeagles"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nfl\/114557890552190956","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73177","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=73177"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73177\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/73178"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=73177"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=73177"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=73177"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}