“So that’s what y’all wanted to see, huh?”
Those eight words, uttered by Jalen Hurts upon his arrival at the Week 15 postgame podium, nicely sum up the ride of the Super Bowl LIX champion Philadelphia Eagles. Hell, put it on the commemorative shirts and make it the title of the season highlight video. The Eagles had just beaten the Pittsburgh Steelers for their franchise-record 10th consecutive win, and their stone-faced quarterback took aim at his critics who thought the team was in danger of squandering its potential.
Hurts knew. The whole team did. One, these Eagles knew they had what it took to be champions. Two, they knew that plenty of people out there thought they didn’t. Three, they knew the only way to change minds was to go out there and win the games. So they did. Fourteen times in the regular season and four more in the playoffs. There are no more opponents left.
Eight weeks later, this time on a much bigger podium, in the middle of the stadium that has hosted more Super Bowls than any other, this building where so many players and teams have stamped their legacies and altered the history of this league that has so captured our collective attention, Hurts stood in a cloud of green confetti holding the Lombardi Trophy.
So that’s what y’all wanted to see, huh?
Players love to say that each season is its own story—teammates come and go, the locker rooms are different—but that is not how fans digest the unending parade of seasons that go by. We follow these soap operas and build these worlds as characters’ stories unfold over time. And you simply can’t tell the story of the 2024 Eagles’ season without the context of the two years that led up to it.
Two seasons ago, these Eagles came about as close as you can to winning a Super Bowl. That season, Hurts’s second as a starter, was the joyous run of a team quickly exceeding expectations. They traded for A.J. Brown and then presto. A second Super Bowl appearance in six years as the Eagles rebuilt around some of the same core players and all of the same defining principles. The team had established itself as an upper-echelon program in the NFL. Suddenly having one Lombardi Trophy was a disappointment, which would have been hard to imagine for fans who had followed the franchise the previous few decades.
The revenge tour was abruptly cut short. A 10–1 start felled by an epic collapse the team still either can’t or won’t fully explain. It was unclear whether the franchise would be able to reload or have to start from scratch. The chance to prove this team had championship mettle took an extra year.
Rarely in sports do we get such a tidy narrative as we did over the past two weeks. The Eagles found their way back to the same stage against the same opponent. Same teams. Same coaches. Same quarterbacks. History will remember this as a revenge game. They got plenty of it.
Whether it was because of the Super Bowl loss or the year-after collapse, this season had a different tenor. Two years ago, Eagles players celebrated the NFC championship by awkwardly singing “Fly, Eagles, Fly” on the postgame podium. It had an air of, Look at us and look where we are. This year, after reaching that same checkpoint, Terry Bradshaw asked Jeffrey Lurie how surprised he was to be going back to the Super Bowl and Lurie answered, “Well it’s kind of expected, I think.” The stadium roared its approval.
It is easy to look back with rose-colored glasses now. It’s easy to say this was the most talented Eagles team of the Super Bowl era. The best roster. The most perfectly constructed on both sides of the ball. It’s easy to say it after a 50-burger in the NFC championship game rolled into two weeks of Super Bowl media coverage about how the Eagles had the best defense in the league and the deepest roster of the two squads in the Superdome.
But much of the season did not feel like that. There was the 2–2 start, followed by close calls fending off opponents such as the Cleveland Browns, Jacksonville Jaguars and Carolina Panthers, who all have top-eight picks incoming and all had chances to beat Philadelphia late. The Eagles scored 17 first-quarter points—total—in the first 13 games of the season. Even the first two playoff games had people questioning what was wrong with the team. Fans were panicked as recently as the divisional round.
But the wins kept coming and now none of the details matter. That’s the nice thing about winning. And these Eagles did a lot of it.
They were not the best team in all four quarters of all 21 games. But they played their best in some of their most important games, which was really our first clue. Their best was better than anyone else’s and they were at their best just enough, including eight vital quarters in the two games where they give out trophies afterward.
Hurts is a Super Bowl MVP. On the night he was drafted, analysts were talking about him being a gadget player who might see the field in multi-quarterback formations. Now he’s a made man. He is in the club forever. While our sports discourse ecosystem spends the rest of Lamar Jackson’s, Josh Allen’s and Joe Burrow’s primes tearing them down until or unless they win a championship, Hurts will glide past that narrative, the way Tom Brady, Ben Roethlisberger and Russell Wilson did when they won young.
Hurts earned it. He has now played two of the best games of his life in the Super Bowl. He has the iconic locker room photo. The field photo. The Jordan Brand commercial. You can never take it away. Our society makes life more difficult than it should be for the guys still chasing their first ring, which means Hurts gets to enjoy all the trappings of having crawled through to the other side. That’s the tradeoff for choosing this life.
This Eagles team didn’t make it pretty, but everything looks prettier in hindsight when the story has a happy ending. These moments will be treasured speed bumps of adversity that built character along the way, not looming problems that foreshadowed fatal flaws.
It wasn’t all bad, of course. The Eagles won 18 times.
This season will be remembered for so much. The trip to Brazil. Saquon Barkley’s backward hurdle. Brown reading a book on the sideline. Barkley declining to go in and break his career high in rushing yards against his former team. The snow game against the Los Angeles Rams. The 55 points against the Washington Commanders. Cooper DeJean spearing Derrick Henry and then pick-sixing Patrick Mahomes in the Super Bowl on his 22nd birthday.
These moments will be etched into Philadelphia sports lore.
Barkley was the story of the season, and not just because of the Hard Knocks memes. Sitting out Week 18 instead of trying to break Eric Dickerson’s single-season rushing record may get him just as much positive attention as breaking the record would have. Going on a historic postseason heater and capping it with a Super Bowl definitely will. He became an all-time Eagles legend over the past five months. He might someday be a Hall of Famer because of the past five weeks.
Barkley was unstoppable, breaking 2,000 yards rushing in the regular season and becoming the first player to cross 2,500 between the regular season and playoffs combined. He had four rushing touchdowns of 60-plus yards in the regular season and three more in the postseason. Sort of like how the tush push—the Eagles’ signature play of this era—has become unstoppable. Or how an Eagles pass rush that sacked Mahomes six times despite not blitzing him once was unstoppable.
The Eagles set a record for rushing yards in one playoff run. They set a record for points in a conference championship game, then poured on 40 more in the Super Bowl. As much as they might have toyed with their fans at points this season, they toyed with opponents more.
The Eagles have transformed the identity of their franchise in a span between Super Bowls LII and LIX. They went 0-for-the-first-51 Super Bowls but have now gone shot-for-shot to win an epic shootout against Tom Brady and put an all-time beatdown on Mahomes.
For the first 25 years of this century, they have been a model franchise. Only four teams have more wins over that span. Only two teams have more playoff appearances or division titles. Now only two teams have more championships or more Super Bowl appearances. The Eagles finally have the hardware to back up their standing in nearly every other metric to measure success.
25 seasons since 2000 is a nice round number, and here's how the Eagles stack up against the rest of the league. pic.twitter.com/QdDXuTax4o
— Mitch Goldich 🐙 (@mitchgoldich) February 10, 2025
And they’ve done it in a city where losing is often measured in decades. The baseball club has lost more games than any other professional sports franchise on the planet. The basketball team won its most recent title more than 40 years ago, and the hockey team is a few months shy of 50.
Before this recent stretch, still spanned by team leaders Brandon Graham and Lane Johnson, Philly hadn’t celebrated an NFL championship since 1960—that’s before they started slapping Roman numerals on title games, practically a prehistoric era.
The Eagles have changed the way they’ll be thought of for decades, and of course, they may not be done. Hurts is the eighth quarterback to reach the Super Bowl twice within the first five years of his career, and six of the others got to at least a third. He’s still only 26.
Patrick Mahomes had lorded over the league for seven full seasons. He was drafted in 2017, and not a single quarterback who’d entered the league since then had won a Super Bowl until Hurts broke through.
The Eagles have proved they can do it and are as well-positioned as anyone to return. Of course, that will only raise expectations higher. But this is the new reality the Eagles have created for themselves, and everyone who poured onto Broad Street to celebrate Sunday night will gladly take that deal.
Hurts will meet many of them at a parade later this week, and I can think of eight simple words he could say to them when he gets the microphone.
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as With Second Super Bowl Title, Eagles Show They’re Worthy of Great Expectations.
