Super Bowl LIX: The Most Philly Event in Philly History

The Philadelphia Eagles won Super Bowl LIX after defeating the two-time defending champion Kansas City Chiefs 40-22.

It’s an 18-point margin, and it felt even wider as the game progressed, once being 34-0.

Leading up to the game, the take that dominated the analysis was, “Well, the Eagles are the better team in arguably every single position aside from the quarterback and the head coach and having the pedigree of a champion and have far better talent, but I would feel like an idiot betting against Mahomes and Andy Reid!”

We saw the better and more talented team show up and click in every possible facet.

Eagles Defense

The Eagles defense that went from worst to first from last year to this one after hiring coordinator Vic Fangio played arguably a perfect game- forcing pressure on 16 of Mahomes’s dropbacks and forcing 3 turnovers without even calling a blitz play once; that isn’t play-calling- that’s just acquiring and developing players from the trenches out.

It made Patrick Mahomes play maybe the most rattled we’ve ever seen him before for a man that’s in pursuit of Tom Brady’s rings and legacy as the greatest of all-time; he could never get comfortable, was sacked more than ever in his career, and now has two Super Bowl losses by a combined 40 points in the two iterations of the team where they couldn’t give him a clean pocket.

Eagles Offense

For the Eagles’ offense, if you would have told Philly fans that Saquon Barkley would have only had 57 yards and no touchdowns, you would have likely chalked it up as a low-scoring, defensive Chiefs win.

The truth of the matter is that they didn’t even really need the man who put up the best end-to-end season for a running back ever because of Jalen Hurts; he proved he could throw the ball when it mattered most, going 17/22 for two touchdowns on the deep ball to AJ Brown and Devonta Smith, and he extended plays with his legs as the team’s leading rusher.

This is maybe the most emblematic, appropriate ending to a season to define a team and a city that one could conjure up: a middle finger to the doubters from the city of brotherly love. Philadelphia went out there and shut everyone up. 

PHOTO: James Lang/Imagn Images

It was silencing the doubters by retooling rather than rebuilding. Last year, they started at an uninspiring 10-1, fizzled out by losing 6 of 7 with the worst defense in football and firing the coordinators with a head coach on the hot seat after an early playoff exit. They lost Jason Kelce to retirement as the cornerstone of the offensive line. Within a year, they were able to do the unthinkable in the NFL because of the Draft Day cliche of continuing the old-head mindset: they looked at themselves in the mirror, saw what needed to be fixed, and took risks to adjust.

Howie Roseman has continued to try new things and manage assets to where they’re permanently within reach of being one of the most talented rosters in football by being able to look in the mirror and pivot. They bring in a young quarterback seemingly every year, even if they didn’t need one, so that they can always have a Nick Foles, Jalen Hurts, or a Kenny Pickett that knows the system. They saw that they had whiffed on drafting skill guys like JJ Arcega-Whiteside and Jalen Raegor, who was taken before Justin Jefferson, and turned it into building through the trenches and spending other capital-like assets for AJ Brown or Saquon in free agency. Doesn’t it always seem like the Eagles also draft the well-known college guys (many from Georgia) that a lot of experts are high on and that teams are too scared to take? And that they’re always within reach of going out and grabbing an asset rather than losing something?

The New Orleans Saints are approximately $54 million in debt as a LOSING franchise. The Dallas Cowboys are so stuck in their ways that they have an owner who blames the Sun and the Moon for being unable to put up curtains in their own stadium that allow their receivers to not see the ball.

The Eagles could trade for Myles Garrett tomorrow, and you would shrug. That’s how well-run they are.

It was Jalen Hurts silencing that he’s a personality-less pretty boy that you could win WITH, but not because he threw for his best two games of his career in both the Super Bowls he played.

It was Saquon Barkley reverse-hurdling defenders as an alien specimen, unlike anything you’ve ever seen in a New York Giants revenge tour that was so glorious that even if you loathed Philly, you rooted for his personal success as he was freed from the shackles of a moribund franchise that refused to pay him.

It was Nick Sirianni proving he wasn’t just a spiteful puppet master that shaved his head and boos his own fans that wanted him out as now the head coach with the best active winning % and making the Super Bowl twice in four years and never missing the playoffs.

It was being told the Eagles have a dysfunctional locker room where AJ Brown is reading books on the sidelines and not getting along with players and that they wouldn’t trust them to beat a team as competent as the Chiefs because simply “they’re the Chiefs” and the talent disparity shouldn’t even matter.

It was Philadelphia.

The team was written off because every time an organization from the city makes it to the mountaintop, the cosmos finds a new way for the citizens to be mad and anguished, and some of them like it that way.

The Eagles got their moment as the most talented team in football this year in the most fitting Philly fashion.

They better leave those poles greased for a long time.

PHOTO: James Lang/Imagn Images