I can’t quit the Eagles, either

Thoughts on the Super Bowl-bound Philadelphia Eagles

I am a fraud. 

I had said in these pages that I don’t care about the NFL anymore. But there I was, in a bar, with friends, drinking beer, watching the best Philadelphia Eagle of my lifetime diminish the Washington Commanders’ will to live in the NFC Championship Game. Was that me pumping my fists to running back Saquon Barkley and applying phrases like “will to live” to a ball game? If I’m not a fraud, then I’m Michael Corleone.

I maintain my critique of the sport. It’s too boring. Ninety percent of the most popular TV show in America is SUV commercials and grown men standing around, which both makes a ton of sense and none. 

It takes too long. I drank a thousand Michelob Ultras during the telecast.

It's too violent. The Eagles’ starting center Cam Jurgens couldn’t walk due to a bad back, so against the Commanders left guard Landon Dickerson took his place. Dickerson then hurt his knee, so he couldn’t walk. Jurgens then waddled onto the field as his own emergency replacement, and at his locker after the game he sat through his postgame interviews on a stool like an exhausted boxer.

Why can't I quit the NFL?

But in last Sunday’s game the Eagles’ offensive linemen weren’t individual blockers so much as they were a snowplow, a single forceful unit pushing crap to the side, even with just four functional adults. Behind them ran Barkley, whose gravitational force bent space-time as he gained eight yards per carry. Quarterback Jalen Hurts occasionally had to toss the ball to receivers A.J. Brown and DeVonta Smith, who caught passes with the nonchalance and familiarity of a janitor mopping a floor. The team’s performance was clinical and all-encompassing and showed there are 10 too many teams in the NFL. (My friends are exhausted by my arguing for relegation in American sports, but I am right. Among other benefits, it would ensure greatness happens more often.) (Please don’t tell baseball I’m cheating on it.) My favorite part about the Eagles game, though, was the continued use of the best play in football, the “tush push.”

Why baseball needs promotion and relegation

It is effective, sure—the Eagles converted four of their five tush pushes (tushes push?)—but it’s also efficient and relatively safe. In the modern, pass-happy NFL, incompletions result in clock stoppages, and I’m dry heaving just thinking about a three-and-out, a punt, and a commercial break. The tush push, at most a two-yard run, keeps the clock moving. Use it every play, please. Tush pushers and the defenders also kind of lurch into one another, rather than try to dismember each other at full speed. The play ends in a pile of humanity, but those humans emerge with their brains and limbs intact.

Many decried the play after the Eagles popularized it a few years ago, and some think it should be banned, and those people are wrong. The tush push is an elegant solution to a simple problem: how do I go from here to there? Not everyone can figure that out. The Buffalo Bills are on a beach somewhere, and not on their way to New Orleans for the Super Bowl, because they couldn’t execute short-yardage plays. 

The Eagles’ dominance surprised me after I watched maybe half their games this season, and I did so through my fingers. There’s only so many things I can care about, and there’s only so much Philadelphia sporting pain I can handle. After each Eagles win I would text “Fire Siriani” to my friends. The Eagles head coach is a dork, but I didn’t actually believe he should be dismissed. It was a way for me to keep the team and the sport at arm's length. Acting like the Eagles were a disaster staved off disaster.

The NFC Championship Game was the first time this season I let my guard down. What did I learn? Drinking beer with friends and watching phenomenal athletes do their jobs is fun, and also hating things is exhausting. MAGAs must be emotionally drained. Made-up shit like wokeness, election fraud, and migrant caravans occupy their minds constantly, to speak nothing of the real things that must worry them—paying the bills, maintaining their families’ health, and keeping their Ford F-350s scratch-free. If they drop their grievances towards the LGBT community, and I drop mine toward football, then we can all live in harmony. 

Just kidding. I always knew sports and beer are fun, and Trump and his acolytes are a scourge. I’d rather the Eagles lose every game for the rest of eternity than compromise with the fascists or give them any grace. But I do feel embarrassed for being a hater this season. I am not cool because I have the perfect lefty take on American football. I gain nothing by rooting against the coach who led—*clears throat*—my team to two Super Bowls in three years. After the Eagles’ victory last week, my hoagie-mouthed brethren back home claimed Broad Street from cars and threw a party. There’s nothing cooler than an impromptu civic celebration.

Will I always complain about having to dedicate three weeks to watch four quarters of football? Yes. Will I always brace for impact while watching Philadelphia sports? Who would I be if I didn’t. But the Eagles’ Super Bowl run reminds me of how much better it is to believe in something and that something not being retribution or conspiracies. I’m referring to joy, which is only felt when we risk pain and which is only real when it is shared.