Complete and utter dominance. On the biggest stage, with the Chiefs dominating the headlines in their attempt to win a third consecutive title, the Eagles comprehensively manhandled them in New Orleans.

The 40-22 final score in Super Bowl LIX seems unfair both to a Philadelphia defense that shut down Kansas City until a couple of garbage-time touchdowns in the fourth quarter and to a Kansas City defense that battled gamely before finally getting overwhelmed by short fields and the sheer volume of snaps it had to play.

Imagine being a Chiefs fan and getting to see pieces of the box score of this game in advance. The Chiefs did the best job any team has done all season against Saquon Barkley, who ran 25 times for 57 yards. The Eagles went 3-for-12 on third downs, failed to convert their only fourth down, turned the ball over in the red zone and averaged 5.1 yards per play -- fewer than the Chiefs. All of that sounds like the sort of game the Chiefs would expect to win given what they're capable of doing on offense.

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All of that is true and the Chiefs still fell behind 34-0 during the third quarter, precisely because of what they couldn't do on offense. This was the worst possible time for Patrick Mahomes to have what will likely go down as his worst big game as a pro. Before saving his numbers with those late fourth-quarter scores, he looked as flummoxed as we've ever seen him.

If you had told that same Chiefs fan that Mahomes was about to go 6-of-14 for 33 yards with two interceptions in the first half of the Super Bowl, that fan could have done more productive things with a free Sunday. Those 33 yards were the fewest Mahomes has ever posted in the first half of any NFL game. His 10.9 passer rating was the third worst from any quarterback in the first half of a game this season. By expected points added (EPA) per dropback, his minus-1.36 mark was the 10th worst by any quarterback in the first half of any game since the start of the 2018 season.

Even with his late scoring drives, Mahomes finished with a Total QBR of 11.4, his second-worst performance in 133 career starts. Let's assign credit appropriately: The Eagles did that. More specifically, the same Philadelphia defensive line that was tormented and torched so badly by Mahomes in Super Bowl LVII two years ago took over this game. While defensive coordinator Vic Fangio and his secondary will rightfully earn credit for a dominant performance, the front seven is the key to understanding why Mahomes & Co. were ground into dust.

Jump to a section:
Four ways in which Philly's D dominated
Five ways in which KC got it terribly wrong
How Hurts and the Eagles got here

How the Eagles took down Patrick Mahomes

They exploited and overpowered Kansas City's tackles. Go back to the last time Fangio coached against an Andy Reid-led offense. It was the wild-card round last season, with Fangio serving as defensive coordinator for the Dolphins. Without his top two edge rushers due to injury -- Bradley Chubb and Jaelan Phillips -- the normally conservative Fangio turned on the heat. The veteran coordinator blitzed Mahomes on more than 51% of the quarterback's dropbacks, his third-highest blitz rate in more than 220 games as a coordinator since 2007. Nobody wants to blitz Mahomes, who has lit up blitzes since entering the league, but Fangio surely felt like the alternative was sitting back and withering away on defense.

On Sunday, the Eagles didn't blitz once on Mahomes' 42 dropbacks. (They had a couple of plays that would technically qualify as blitzes when the Eagles sent Zack Baun, but they dropped a lineman off into coverage as part of the snap.) Fangio rushed four players 39 times and three players three times. The Eagles still managed to pressure Mahomes on nearly 45% of his dropbacks through three quarters before Fangio gave his backups some run in the fourth. They sacked Mahomes six times with a four-man rush, something that has never happened to the future Hall of Famer in his career. He had never been sacked more than four times by a three- or four-man rush in a single game.

When these two teams played in the title game two years ago, the Eagles managed to get pressure on Mahomes, but he wriggled and maneuvered his way out of danger. A dominant Philadelphia defensive line pressured him on 37% of his dropbacks then, but it failed to take him down for a sack on 11 pressures. Those 11 snaps produced just 35 yards, but a lack of negative plays helped keep the Chiefs afloat on offense in a shootout. This time, the Eagles finished the job. They ran a similar pressure rate to that Super Bowl (38%), but they turned six of those 15 pressures into sacks.

Those sacks didn't come from the player most would have expected. Jalen Carter had a solid game, but he didn't singlehandedly wreck opponents the way he had for much of the season. After much discussion about whether the Eagles would move him away from star guard Trey Smith, they decided to keep him there for the majority of his snaps, and the Chiefs double-teamed Carter on only a handful of snaps. Carter forced a holding penalty and had a couple of impressive plays, but he wasn't the most dominant player on the Philly line.

Instead, in their final game before free agency, this was the Josh Sweat and Milton Williams show. The two Eagles draftees combined for 4.5 sacks. Down the rotation, Jalyx Hunt and Moro Ojomo showed up with splash plays and quality snaps. Brandon Graham, a surprise activation during the week after recovering from what was expected to be a season-ending torn triceps, played 18 snaps and nearly bowled over right tackle Jawaan Taylor to draw a holding penalty.

Taylor had a rough game, but it didn't compare to what happened at left tackle. There's no way to sugarcoat it: Joe Thuney looked like a fish out of water on the edge in pass protection. It's one thing for a converted guard playing tackle out of desperation and a lack of better options to get beat by speed around the edge. It's another for Thuney to get driven backward into Mahomes' lap by Hunt, a 251-pound former college safety.

Charting the game through Williams' violent strip-sack of Mahomes in the fourth quarter, I have Thuney down for seven plays that led to pressures of Mahomes, including three that led to sacks. He was beaten straight up by Hunt and Sweat and on twists by Williams. He might have been a victim of unrealistic expectations after holding up for most of the postseason on Mahomes' blind side, but reality came crashing down Sunday.

Thuney wasn't the only one. Taylor was responsible for six pressures, including that play in which he was knocked a yard backward by Graham before being flagged for a desperate hold. Mike Caliendo, filling in at left guard for Thuney, struggled with twists and was steamrolled by Williams for the fourth-quarter strip-sack of Mahomes that took the last of the air out of Kansas City's sails.

The Chiefs never had answers for dealing with the pass rush besides hoping the offensive line played better. They spent most of the game blocking with five linemen before mixing in chips from tight ends and running backs, which didn't necessarily help; a Travis Kelce chip prevented the future Hall of Fame tight end from getting into his route quickly on a play that ended with a Mahomes sack, while a chip from Isiah Pacheco disengaged Sweat from Taylor and allowed him to take down a scrambling Mahomes. They tried moving the launch point for Mahomes by using built-in scrambles, but one of those plays led to the pick-six by Cooper DeJean.

They took away Mahomes' escape hatch. In Super Bowl LVII and just about every other big game since, Mahomes has managed to make a difference with his legs. While that has included the occasional designed run, the thing that scares opposing defensive coordinators is what he does as a scrambler. It's tough to spy him when a defense is usually committing so many coverage resources to Kelce, and if the coordinator uses twists and games up front to try to create pressure, any sort of misstep or over-aggression from the line opens up a lane for him to exploit. The Eagles know it all too well, given that Mahomes scrambled for 26 yards to set up the game-winning field goal two years ago.

This time, the big scramble never came. In addition to winning one-on-one, Philadelphia's edge rushers did a great job of walling off the edges and forcing Mahomes to try to escape pressure by stepping up into the pocket as opposed to escaping through the sides and extending plays. And once he stepped up, the Eagles' defensive linemen were simply too big and too fast to run past. There were too many moments in which Mahomes attempted to scramble, changed his mind then did a full turn to try to gain some acceleration and get away, only to be sacked or forced into a wild throw.

Mahomes didn't scramble for a first down all game, the first time that has happened in a playoff game since the loss to the Patriots in the 2018 AFC Championship Game. He didn't have a single scramble attempt until midway through the third quarter and didn't run for more than 8 yards on any of his attempts. Hunt made a nice play with an ankle tackle to stop what could have been a bigger scramble. Taking away those conversions made Mahomes one-dimensional.

They won over and over again on third down against the league's best third-down offense. While the Chiefs struggled on first and second down consistently throughout the season, Mahomes usually bailed them out by converting on third downs. The Chiefs picked up 50% of their third downs during the regular season with Mahomes on the field, the best rate of any offense, and were at 45% during the postseason before this game.

On Sunday, they failed to convert on their first nine attempts on third down through three quarters, before finally picking up a third-and-7 with 1:25 to go trailing 34-0. It's just the fourth time in the Mahomes era the Chiefs have gone an entire first half without converting a third down. (One of the other three was Super Bowl LVII against the Eagles, but that was on only three attempts.) Reid's offense finished 3-of-12 on third and fourth downs.

Through those first nine third-down attempts before the initial conversion on a throw to Kelce, the Eagles won with pressure on six. The three that didn't include pressure were a quick snap in which Mahomes threw low to Kelce, a designed rollout on the pick-six to DeJean and a quick third-and-13 throw to Kelce for 9 yards to set up a manageable fourth down. Six of those nine plays came with 9 or more yards to go, and as good as Mahomes is, the Chiefs didn't want to live in third-and-long against this defense.

Unlike the AFC title game against the Bills two weeks ago, when the Chiefs were able to successfully use picks and crossing routes, Reid never seemed to find short-to-intermediate solutions to attack Philadelphia's zone defense. NFL Next Gen Stats marked the Eagles down for just two snaps of man coverage on 42 dropbacks all night. Mahomes picked up a first down on his opening snap of the game with a triple-option RPO, but the Chiefs didn't find a non-RPO passing solution to consistently create space. They tried flooding the zones with multiple receivers, but Philadelphia did a great job of passing off routes and matching to Kansas City's concepts.

It was clear Mahomes didn't want to test Quinyon Mitchell and Darius Slay. the Eagles' outside cornerbacks. In the first half, he threw outside the numbers three times for a total of 2 yards. The Chiefs wanted to attack the middle of the field, but he went 4-of-11 for 30 yards and two picks throwing there in the first half. He had more success throwing to the sideline in the second half when he had no alternative, but it was too little, too late.

Mahomes didn't play well. It's important to make this distinction. This game will be lumped in with the last time he lost in the Super Bowl, and there's an obvious similarity. In both games, he was seemingly running for his life on every down behind a porous offensive line that wasn't capable of blocking the opposing defense. That Bucs defense under Todd Bowles in Super Bowl LV was dialing up exotic pressures and blitzing defensive backs, while Fangio was rushing three and four linemen all night, but that's not really important in the big picture. Blitz or no blitz, the story seems to be that if defenses can put pressure on Mahomes, he can struggle.

In that Buccaneers loss, Mahomes was phenomenal. He wasn't perfect, but under impossible circumstances, he was extending plays and making unreal throws, only for those passes to be dropped or come up just short. There was a reason clips of Mike Evans and Chris Godwin calling him "unbelievable" and "a magician" during the game went viral.

Even after accounting for the pressure put on by the Eagles in this game, Mahomes simply didn't play well. In the first half, he went 6-of-9 for 33 yards out of clean pockets with a minus-12.1% completion percentage over expectation (CPOE). He threw a painful pick-six to DeJean without pressure on a play in which the two-time MVP simply didn't see DeJean in his throwing lane, the sort of mistake a rookie might be expected to make. His second pick came on a play in which Thuney was deposited in his lap, but he didn't reset and his throw was subsequently short and nowhere near his receiver, a carbon copy of the pick he threw to Roquan Smith against the Ravens in Week 1.

It's fair to suggest the pass rush wore on Mahomes as the game went along, and I would suspect there's some truth to that. Even on the first possession of the game, though, he seemed jittery. On the opening third down of the game for the Chiefs, he scrambled under a modest amount of pressure, ran his way into trouble and then, while scrambling, attempted a dangerous pass that was lucky to not be intercepted. He uncharacteristically missed a fourth-and-4 speed out to DeAndre Hopkins from a clean pocket, leaving the pass too far inside and allowing Avonte Maddox to knock the ball away.

Is there anything the Chiefs could have done? Maybe not, given how dominant the Eagles' front was. But there were likely a few mistakes they would take back or try to approach differently with hindsight.

Where did the Chiefs go wrong?

They let the left tackle problem linger until it was too late. This loss can be traced back to Week 2. The Chiefs entered the season with second-year lineman Wanya Morris and rookie second-round pick Kingsley Suamataia competing for the starting job protecting Mahomes' blind side at left tackle. Suamataia won the camp competition, but after he struggled against Trey Hendrickson and the Bengals, the Chiefs benched him for Morris. Suamataia saw meaningful snaps in only two games the rest of the way, filling in for an injured Morris before spending Week 18 at guard alongside backups in a loss to the Broncos.

The time to find and bring in a veteran tackle was then, because once Reid lost faith in Suamataia, they had to start preparing for a scenario in which they needed one. Morris had been a problem filling in for Donovan Smith as a rookie in 2023, and he had lost the camp battle to Suamataia in August. Smith was still a free agent and never ended up signing anywhere, but the Chiefs elected to hold the line.

It wasn't until late November when the Chiefs finally signed a veteran tackle, inking D.J. Humphries to a one-year deal for $2 million. The former Cardinals starter made his debut three weeks later against the Chargers, only to suffer a hamstring injury and miss the next three games. Reid gave him another trial at left tackle in Week 18, but the coach apparently didn't like what he saw.

Instead, after pushing Thuney out to left tackle, the Chiefs kept him there for the remainder of the season. With Caliendo stepping in at guard, Reid now had subpar starters at two spots as opposed to one. The offense did fine with Thuney during postseason wins over the Texans and Bills, but the three-time Pro Bowler was badly overmatched in the Super Bowl.

With Morris inactive, the only options the Chiefs had at halftime were kicking Thuney back to guard and putting in Suamataia or Humphries at left tackle, both of whom Reid clearly didn't trust. Humphries was active during the postseason but played only on special teams. Neither player got on the field Sunday. It's tough to find a left tackle in-season, but the Chiefs would have had a better shot if they had started seriously looking around before the trade deadline as opposed to waiting until late-November to bring in a veteran.

They completely abandoned the run. When Reid was coaching the Eagles, a common criticism was that he got away from running the ball. Reid's pass rates would look almost quaintly conservative now, but before the 2007 Patriots, his Philadelphia offense leaned more heavily into the pass than just about any other team.

On Sunday, as those same fans were likely celebrating an Eagles victory, I agreed with that criticism. The Chiefs simply didn't run the ball early in a situation in which they desperately needed to take some of the pressure off Mahomes. While they used some RPOs and threw the ball early, they ran the ball just once on their first four possessions. Sure, that's only 13 plays, but a 12-1 pass-run ratio is a little extreme by anybody's standards. Throwing the ball that often is fine if it's working, but they weren't scoring or moving the ball.

Reid did run the ball twice to start the next drive, but when they gained only 1 yard, the Chiefs went back to passing. Pacheco started the third quarter with a run for 6 yards, but the next four plays were all passes. Kareem Hunt ran for 10 yards on the next drive, but after a holding call, Kansas City then ran for 1 yard on a second-and-14 draw.

The run game wasn't going to win this for the Chiefs, and their backs turned seven carries into only 24 yards, which isn't exactly beautiful football. But the threat of the run might have kept them out of third-and-long in a game in which the Eagles brutalized them in those spots. It could have slowed down the pass rush or given the offensive line a chance to attack the line of scrimmage. Frankly, it couldn't have been much worse than what they did on their dropbacks.

They needed to go bigger. One of the ways the Chiefs could have tried to gain an advantage while running the ball would have been to go with bigger personnel groupings. Since the Tyreek Hill trade, Reid has leaned into 12 (one back, two tight ends) and even 13 (one back, three tight ends) personnel groupings, using Noah Gray alongside Kelce. In addition to adding more blockers on the field for run concepts, the Chiefs use the personnel groupings to try to dictate personnel and create potential mismatches in the passing game.

Instead, they went with 11 personnel (one back, one TE, three receivers) on 74% of their snaps Sunday, using 12 personnel just 26% of the time. There's an argument to be made that's a product of playing from behind, but Reid actually used 12 personnel slightly more in the second half (28%) than the first (25%). The Chiefs weren't great in either personnel grouping, but Mahomes did hit a 50-yard touchdown pass against Philadelphia's backups in the secondary out of 12 personnel late in the game.

They couldn't avoid sloppy mistakes. This isn't where the Chiefs lost this game: The Eagles won it by imposing their will. But it's also fair to mention that the Chiefs made uncharacteristic blunders that might have steered the game closer to becoming a contest.

They extended Eagles drives with penalties. After appearing to get a stop on a third-and-5 throw that Jalen Hurts sailed to Dallas Goedert, the Eagles were given a new set of downs because Trent McDuffie struck Goedert in the head. (Chiefs fans probably didn't love the call, but it felt a little like a makeup whistle after incidental contact to the face mask from A.J. Brown wiped off a fourth-down conversion for the Eagles' offense on the prior drive.) The Eagles scored a touchdown three plays later.

With 2:28 to go in the first half trailing 17-0, the Chiefs appeared well on their way to getting off the field when they sniffed out a second-and-26 screen to Barkley. After the pass fell incomplete, though, Nick Bolton knocked Barkley over. He was flagged for unsportsmanlike conduct, turning a third-and-26 into a first-and-10. The Eagles didn't score on the drive, but the penalty took time off the clock and shifted field position. Kansas City eventually took over from its own 6-yard line, at which point Mahomes was backed into the end zone under pressure and threw a pick.

And after the Eagles scored, the Chiefs appeared to have a brief glimmer of hope to get some points on the board. Facing a third-and-11, Mahomes stepped out of the pocket, scrambled and found a wide-open Hopkins on a busted coverage. Mahomes' throw was on time, but Hopkins dropped what could have been a massive gain:

Lot of open space for DeAndre Hopkins there. pic.twitter.com/BtTdIRWTqb

Bill Barnwell (@billbarnwell) February 10, 2025

NFL Next Gen Stats estimates that pass gets completed 82.2% of the time and should generate a whopping 26.6 yards after the catch, which would have given the Chiefs the ball at the Eagles' 26 with one timeout. They would have probably come away from that scenario with at least three points. It didn't swing the game, but it's the sort of opportunity the Chiefs don't often miss. It was that sort of day.

The defense allowed explosives in the passing game. Given how well the Chiefs tackled and slowed down Barkley, they can't be too upset with how they played on defense. Forty points is a lot, but that includes a pick-six, three drives that started on Kansas City's side of the field and two more that started beyond the Philadelphia 40-yard line. The Eagles had two drives with more than 50 yards all game, only the fourth time that happened all season.

As good as they were against the run, though, the Chiefs weren't as effective stopping the Eagles from picking up chunk plays through the air, and it wasn't always from their star receivers. On the second drive, Hurts hit Goedert on a blown coverage for a 20-yard completion, with no defender matching in zone to the tight end's crossing route. Later on the same drive, the Chiefs blitzed on second-and-11 and Jaylen Watson was beaten by little-used third wideout Jahan Dotson, whom Hurts found for what appeared to be the opening touchdown of the game. While Dotson was ruled to be just short of the end zone on review, his 27-yard catch set up the opening score on a Hurts tush push.

Hurts continued to find big plays. On a third-and-7, he went back to Brown against McDuffie on a back-shoulder for 22 yards. McDuffie lined up against Brown on 18 of his 24 routes per NFL Next Gen Stats, and while that was the only big completion the star cornerback allowed, it easily could have been two if a 32-yard gain on fourth-and-2 on the opening drive hadn't been called back on a questionable offensive pass interference penalty.

The dagger came in the third quarter. Most teams will warn their defenders to be ready for a shot play around midfield after a turnover, and after the Chiefs failed on fourth-and-4 from their own 47, the Eagles showed why. With the Eagles in 12 personnel and showing a run look, they feigned a power play and dropped Hurts back to pass. The Chiefs showed a single-high shell and then spun to quarters coverage, giving an ideal opportunity to throw the deep post. With Bolton and Drue Tranquill desperately trying to run back after the play-fake to get in coverage, Justin Reid was occupied by Goedert underneath, which freed up DeVonta Smith over the top on the post. Smith beat Watson at the snap and ran free downfield for a 46-yard score.

JALEN TO DEVONTA DEEP TOUCHDOWN!

: #SBLIX on FOX
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NFL (@NFL) February 10, 2025

Jalen Hurts, Super Bowl MVP, and how the Eagles got here

With Barkley quieted for the first time in months, this was the sort of game skeptics of the Eagles (like myself) would have seen as a real concern. While Hurts was excellent in the NFC Championship Game and threw just five interceptions all season, there was a two-month span in which the passing attack wasn't much more than an afterthought. While acknowledging there's no easy way to beat a team that was two drops away from winning 20 of its 21 games this season, the best way seemed to be putting more of the load on Hurts' shoulders and seeing if the 26-year-old was up to the task.

It turns out he was. While Hurts threw an ugly interception against the blitz on a play in which Bolton came untouched through the A-gap, the Eagles did just fine with their quarterback as the focal point of the offense. He went 17-of-22 as a passer for 221 yards and two touchdowns, generating a plus-12.6% CPOE. He added 11 carries for 72 yards and that "tush push" score on the ground.

In the previous Super Bowl matchup between these two teams, one of the few things Hurts wasn't able to do was consistently make the Chiefs pay with downfield throws; he went 2-of-7 for 90 yards on deep pass attempts. He was lights-out Sunday, going 3-of-4 for 95 yards and a touchdown on those throws, with the pick by Bryan Cook as his only blemish. Hurts was 2-of-3 for 42 yards on throws in the intermediate range (10 to 19 yards) as well. In that same area, Mahomes was 0-for-4 with two picks.

While Hurts was only 2-of-5 for 36 yards and that pick on the blitz, I wouldn't put that on him. There was no sight adjustment by Brown on the interception, even though the corner on his side (McDuffie) blitzed from the field, which would typically convert his route to a hitch or something easier than the go route he ran. When the Chiefs ran Cover 0 later in the game and the Eagles had again dialed up four vertical routes, Hurts threw a back-shoulder route to Brown, clearly expecting his star wideout to turn around and break off his route. But Brown continued downfield and the pass fell incomplete, leading to some mild discontent on the sideline for a few moments after the series.

While Mahomes' scrambling in big moments has become legendary, Hurts was the one who made a difference there. He set up a fourth-and-2 (and the big play to Brown that was wiped off) by scrambling for 9 yards on third-and-11 on the opening drive. In the second half, he had scrambles of 14, 16 and 17 yards, all for first downs. The Chiefs tried spying him at times with Leo Chenal, but against four-man rushes and the blitz, Hurts was able to break Kansas City's spirit with his legs.

The title win and Hurts' MVP performance is the final bit of vindication for one of the most controversial draft decisions in recent memory. The Eagles choosing Hurts with their second-round pick in 2020 seemed to send the organization into an immediate tailspin. Quarterback Carson Wentz collapsed the following season and fell out with then-coach Doug Pederson. They essentially fired both their head coach and quarterback, trading Wentz to Indianapolis, while retaining the guy who drafted Hurts, general manager Howie Roseman.

Roseman, coming off a disastrous 2020 draft in which he chose Jalen Reagor over Justin Jefferson at wide receiver, moved down from No. 6 to No. 12 in the 2021 draft before jumping back up to select DeVonta Smith. The extra first-rounder they got for moving down allowed the Eagles to be flexible the following season, when they basically extracted a premium for swapping their 2022 first-rounder with the Saints' first-rounder in 2023. All of those maneuverings eventually landed them Carter, their cornerstone defender.

If there's a lesson we can take away from the Eagles and their title run, it might be one that's hard to follow in the modern NFL: Be patient and don't get overwhelmed by recency bias. Philadelphia ownership didn't fire Roseman when Chip Kelly pushed him out of power in 2015 or when the fans were chanting "Fire Howie" in 2021. He has proceeded to build what has to be considered the league's best roster over the past three seasons.

Hurts was a mess in 2020, completing 52% of his passes and posting a 38.5% success rate as a passer. He was also playing with Reagor and Greg Ward as his top receivers and stuck behind a disastrous offensive line. The Eagles gave him a clear path to the starting job in 2021 with more auspicious surroundings, and he has rewarded them for doing so ever since.

This even extends to the Eagles' fateful 2024 free agent class, and the two coordinators they added. Fangio was all but run out of Miami by his own players, who were celebrating his departure on social media. Kellen Moore had essentially been let go by the Cowboys and Chargers in back-to-back seasons amid concerns that he was more focused on "lighting up the scoreboard" and throwing the ball than producing winning offenses. Moore is now expected to become the Saints' new coach, while Fangio is never going to buy a drink in Philadelphia again.

Barkley just finished what was probably the best season by a running back in league history. Advanced metrics were more optimistic about him than traditional numbers, but he averaged 3.9 yards per carry last season, and the Giants spent the past two years indicating they didn't want to give their own star back a multiyear guaranteed contract. Mekhi Becton was a bust as an offensive tackle who was cast off by the Jets before Philly offensive line coach Jeff Stoutland turned him into a mauling guard. Baun, who was involved with his fifth turnover of the postseason by picking off Mahomes, was a backup edge rusher for the 2023 Saints. The Eagles put each of these players in the right spots to succeed and won Super Bowl LIX.

And then there's the guy Eagles fans have grown to love to hate. This time last year, Nick Sirianni's job was genuinely in question. Even one year removed from a Super Bowl appearance and weeks removed from a 10-1 start, the team had fallen so quickly and so precipitously during the second half of 2023 that it seemed to raise questions about Sirianni's competence. Sirianni essentially fired defensive coordinator Sean Desai during the season, replaced him with Matt Patricia and got only worse on defense. After an embarrassing 32-9 loss to the Bucs in the postseason, it almost felt like a surprise that Sirianni returned to the job in 2024, albeit with new coordinators on both sides of the ball.

And now, 21 games later, Sirianni's Eagles have won 18 of their 21 games. They've lost one game in four months, and that required a drop from Smith and a last-minute touchdown drive from Jayden Daniels. They have routinely been the better-prepared and better-coached team week in and week out, and there are veterans on both sides of the ball who have leveled up and massively improved upon the players they were in prior stops. Roseman, Moore and Fangio all deserve credit for their efforts in making that happen, but it seems impossible and unrealistic to deny Sirianni his fair share of those plaudits.

Sirianni is now 54-23 in his career as an NFL coach. He has more playoff wins (six) than any coach in franchise history besides Reid. And now, he has the one thing on his mantle that Reid failed to achieve during the legendary coach's 14-season run in Philadelphia: the Lombardi Trophy.