PHILADELPHIA — One thing the NFL has always needed is more trophies. This is one area where the college game has always been superior. True, you have to spend four hours of an autumn Saturday afternoon watching two future gym teachers attempt to play quarterback, plus another hour and a half on the halftime show. But the payoff is that you get to see a bunch of 250-pound dudes celebrate as they claim possession of a Little Brown Jug (Michigan-Minnesota) or an Old Brass Spittoon (Indiana-Michigan State) or a Big Brass Ironing Board (I made that one up).
It really is marketing genius. Which makes total sense when you consider that 35% of the players on the field eventually will take an entry-level job for a company that is more or less a pyramid scheme. Every walk of life has its Kentuckys and Indianas. In college football, they get to play for a Bourbon Barrel. In the NFL, they get sent to London.
Think about the sponsorship opportunities the NFL would create if the Texans and Jaguars were suddenly playing for the Bronze Oil Drum or the Old Inflatable Raft instead of fourth place in the AFC South and the No. 3 overall pick. The Bengals and Browns could play for the Crumbling Brick. The Dolphins and Jets could play for the Golden Neck Chain.
At the top of the list would be a trophy that the NFL awards at the end of Week 1. This wouldn’t be a rivalry sort of thing. Instead, the trophy would go to the teams whose performances in their season openers warrant a shock back to reality. We’ll call it the Golden Cattle Prod, awarded to those who need a gentle reminder of how little Week 1 matters.
Bill Belichick once told a group of reporters that a head coach doesn’t really know his team until the middle of October. For whatever reason, that’s always stuck with me. The more NFL seasons that pass by, the more they substantiate the claim. Take the Eagles, for instance. Last year, they opened the season with a 32-6 road win over the Falcons. Jalen Reagor caught six passes, one of them a touchdown. Headlines declared that the defense had been “dominant.” What happened next was what often happens after Week 1. The Eagles lost five of their next six. Reagor caught one more touchdown pass. The defense was not dominant.
I don’t mean to suggest that we should disregard everything that we saw this time around. Your eyes probably aren’t lying when they tell you that A.J. Brown is the first true No. 1 receiver the Eagles have had since Terrell Owens started doing core workouts in his driveway. He might not catch seven first-down passes again, but he is going to be a big value add.
For the most part, though, the Eagles’ 38-35 win over the Lions didn’t really tell us a whole lot about who this team is going to be. We already knew that Jalen Hurts and Nick Sirianni had the advantage when matched up against a subpar defense. The Eagles were the only team in the NFL to rush for 200-plus yards in five games last season. They were one of 11 teams to score 32 points or more in more than five games. They did not struggle against the Lions of the world.
The flip side also is true. People were calling for Sirianni’s job last season when he was 2-5 and making horticultural analogies. That wasn’t unfair: Most NFL coaching hires are bad ones, and a guy who has never been a coordinator or a play-caller has not come close to earning the benefit of the doubt. Likewise for Jonathon Gannon this season. In scoring 35 points against the Eagles, Detroit did something it didn’t do at all in 2021, save for a meaningless Week 18 game against a Packers team that already had clinched the NFC’s top playoff seed.
“I think it’s very clear to the coaches and the players after watching the game what we need to improve on quickly, from an execution standpoint, from a technique standpoint,” Gannon said. “I thought we did some good things, but 35 points is not good enough.”
At the same time, Week 1 did not reveal much in the way of new questions. Any hype that existed about the Eagles defense before the season mostly was a result of our annual civic tradition of talking ourselves up into a lather while attempting to speak something into existence. The irony is that the biggest question that did and still does apply to this unit is whether it can generate enough pressure from the edges to be an above-average pass defense. That quest may have taken a hit with the loss of Derek Barnett to a season-ending ACL injury. But the bigger hit was counting on Barnett to begin with. They are going to need more from Haason Reddick to get to where they need to be: certainly more to make up for having a 230-pound linebacker playing at defensive end.
It’s up to Gannon to make it work, no doubt. There’s a certain level of expectation that comes with the territory. And the head coaching interviews. But there’s also a certain level of leeway that you need to afford a coach over the first quarter of the season: especially a coach who is attempting to incorporate five new key contributors.
If last year’s Week 1 was any indication, we still have a long way to go before we can start to evaluate whether the Eagles have a championship-caliber unit on either side of the football. Until then, here’s your trophy.
Zap!
