The Eagles’ 2023 issues may be impossible to overcome in 2024

It would be a remarkable 180 if the Eagles turned things around next year.

In life, it’s always easier to backslide than it is to scale the mountain.

People who try to lose weight or get healthier often find it’s easier to return to old habits than it is to establish new ones. Grinding away at your job day after day requires more energy and effort than mailing it in. Sometimes, you wake up in the morning and you don’t really feel like being the most engaged parent in the world, taking your son or daughter to yet another music lesson/sports practice/dance recital.

Some 180s are easier to accomplish than others. For a team like the Eagles, it appeared far easier for them to spiral into the depths of whatever the heck it is we’re in now than it was for them to build themselves up into a Super Bowl contender, which is worrisome as the team enters this critical off-season.

After an article by Marcus Hayes in which two Eagles players told him the coaching staff played favorites last season, it’s hard to believe this was essentially the same team that almost beat the Kansas City Chiefs in the Super Bowl less than a year before.

If you were an offensive lineman — Jordan Mailata, Cam Jurgens, or Landon Dickerson — you got treated differently than if you were Jason Kelce or Lane Johnson. And heaven forbid you were a young defensive lineman, like Jordan Davis or Jalen Carter, who could do no right in the last two months, as opposed to Fletcher Cox or Brandon Graham, the former of whom disappeared in the latter part of the season and the latter of whom didn’t show up in the former part of the season.

At the time, this sounded like standard bellyaching from the proletariat — players unwilling to recognize the unspoken entitlement of $255 million quarterbacks and future Hall of Fame players. Now, though, as reports surface about deeper locker-room malignancy, these complaints, if not the root of the collapse, might at least have contributed to it.

So, let’s just recap what this team has reportedly gone through over the last 12 months.

• They lost a crushing Super Bowl to Kansas City.
• Both coordinators departed for other jobs, with Jonathan Gannon burning the team late in the process, denying them an opportunity to keep Vic Fangio around.
• Arguments on the sideline persisted even as the Eagles ran up a 10-1 record, reportedly the most miserable 10-1 team in NFL history.
• Sean Desai was stripped of his defensive coordinator duties for the inept Matt Patricia, creating havoc on the defensive side of the ball.
• Jalen Hurts and A.J. Brown reportedly ignored coaches’ plays and improvised at the end of the Seattle game.
• Brown refused to speak with the media, then when he did, apologized to teammates for having to answer questions for him, but also telling teammates they need to “trust their coaches.”
• Craig Carton said, without proof or attribution, that something happened inside the locker room that was “irreparable,” (a report I don’t believe for a second but has predictably caused a ruckus nonetheless).
• Derrick Gunn reported the absence of Big Dom had the negative ramification of taking away Nick Sirianni’s voice of reason on the sidelines, resulting in Sirianni yelling at players and coaches on the sidelines in a way he hadn’t with Big Dom there.
• Gunn also reported Hurts was distracted over the summer as his contract negotiations intensified and more was required of his time in terms of obligations off the field. I’ve been saying this for months, by the way, albeit with no insider information whatsoever. Sometimes, things are just common sense.
• The team lost six of its last seven games and has since seen Sirianni forced to accept a new offensive and defensive coordinator, as well as multiple other positional coaches to his staff.

Those aren’t just headwinds, folks. Those are sandstorms.

There’s no reason not to believe this latest report from Hayes, given how the team utterly cratered. I’m tempted to believe just about anything that comes out about the ‘23 Eagles following their 1-6 collapse. And with Sirianni now riding a make-it-or-break-it 2024 season, with two new coordinators in tow and a locker room to patch back together, it’s an exceedingly tall order for a head coach who reportedly couldn’t control his emotions well enough on the field as the team faltered around him.

If you have more talent than the other team, chances are you’re going to win a lot more games than you lose, and if the Eagles draft well and make wise investments in free agency, this team should have one of the best rosters in the league heading into training camp later this summer. But one has to wonder if the toxicity that existed inside the Eagles locker room, a toxicity that seemed to emanate almost overnight, grown and festering under the crushing weight of expectations to get back to the Super Bowl and finish the job, can be eliminated in just one off-season.

And, whether it can be eliminated when the head coach who allowed it to grow is still calling the shots.

Had Jeffrey Lurie brought in a new voice to lead the team, it would be easier to believe the team could rebound from its 2023 travails. It’s harder to see how it happens when you’re trying to split the difference — keeping Sirianni on in a caretaker role while bringing in experienced veteran coordinators who will be tasked with being the brains behind the operation.

Past is not always prologue, but with each passing week, another layer of this 2023 Eagles season is peeled away, and none of it has been good. Can this team find a way to incorporate two new coordinators, mesh them together with whatever it is Sirianni is going to do, revitalize a franchise quarterback that took a clear step back last season and rebuild what became the worst defense in the NFL and make a return trip to the Super Bowl?

If they can, it will go down as one of the greatest 180s in NFL history, on the heels of one of the worst 180s we’ve ever seen in professional sports.