A Requiem for a Team
The Philadelphia Eagles 2025 season is over
Defense does not win championships. Defense does not guarantee victories on the long road to the Super Bowl. Defense can not overcome a bad offense or prevent the cracks that slowly trickle throughout a broken team from becoming fissures that swallow every playoff hope and dream.
What defense does is afford you opportunities. Room for error. A door to walk through if you’re bold and savvy enough to open it. In isolation, a great defense can drag you close to the finish line, but your feet will continue to fall short unless the offense can grab the baton.
This is the story of the 2025 Philadelphia Eagles. A tale of two teams. One, a suffocating defense that bends without breaking. That makes giants bleed and stars implode. The other, a relentlessly underwhelming offense with all the talent in the world but no clue what to do with it. Jekyll and Hyde. Two halves that cannot exist as a whole.
The Eagles’ season is over after a brutal 23-19 loss in the wild-card round to the San Francisco 49ers. A loss to recent rivals that happened at home in South Philadelphia. I was there at the stadium to witness all of the Eagles’ weaknesses from this season compound. Their deficiencies caught up with them. You can only outrun your ghosts for so long. They are a collection of loose threads being pulled one at a time until the whole thing finally unravels.
If I were to ask you in Week 5 to play Nostradamus and predict why the Eagles might lose in the first round of the playoffs, you probably would’ve guessed every reason correctly. Poor offensive output and execution, a hole at the second cornerback spot, a missed extra point by Jake Elliot, and bad in-game decision-making. The issues that plagued this team all season are the same ones that led to their downfall against the 49ers.
Kevin Patullo’s offense struggled to move the ball in the second half against a 49ers defense that’s missing nearly half of their season-opening defensive starters. Lane Johnson’s last-minute absence didn’t help, but it also shouldn’t have mattered. The broken Niners got pressure on Hurts, covered our all-world pass catchers downfield, and forced Jalen to play out of rhythm. Bright moments were provided by Dallas Goedert, who scored two touchdowns in the redzone, and Saquon Barkley, doing all he could in the running and passing game to make something out of nothing.
Disjointed playcalling, poor situational awareness, and brutal execution slowly sank this offensive ship. A.J. Brown had the first truly awful game I’ve seen him play in his career in Philadelphia, with three key dropped passes that could’ve singlehandedly shifted the gravity of this contest. One catch could’ve set up Philadelphia in the redzone for a much-needed score. Another, where A.J. dropped a wide-open 3rd down pass in the middle of the field, threatened to prematurely end the game’s final drive.
Jalen Hurts struggled to be a difference maker and failed to take advantage of his legs when the team needed it most. The offensive line provided inconsistent blocking for Barkley and committed key penalties that set the offense behind schedule. The Eagles’ offense is defined by a series of third-and-longs. The team lacked urgency when falling behind in this game, almost with an air of expectation that they would score when the time came. Hubris that led to their downfall.
This season, Jake Elliot has failed to live up to his value as the second-highest-paid kicker in the league. Elliot’s missed extra point after the Eagles’ first touchdown came back to kill this team. Down 23-19, the Eagles were forced to play for a touchdown instead of having the option to kick a field goal to send this game to overtime. On the season, Elliot has made 74% of his field goals, his worst mark since 2020. He’s 37th in the league in field goal percentage and 26th in field goals made. His miss destroyed any room for error this team had, as it has many times throughout this season.
On defense, Quinyon Mitchell played the game of his life. His two interceptions against Brock Purdy gave Philadelphia every opportunity to win. But the Eagles’ offense failed to capitalize, scoring only a field goal off two turnovers.
Unfortunately, the secondary also did their best to make 49ers 3rd string wide receiver Demarcus Robinson look like Jerry Rice. Robinson cracked 100 yards receiving for the first time since Week 10 of 2022, when he played for the Ravens. Most of the damage came against cornerback Adoree Jackson, who, overall all has played better this season but struggled in this one.
Vic Fangio’s black hole defense always got close but not close enough, allowing Brock Purdy to find his way out of a mess, escaping pressure to scramble for yards or find his pass catches downfield. Kyle Juszczyk single-handedly kept drives alive with catches in the middle of the field after George Kittle left the game with an Achilles injury. Christian McCaffrey found the endzone twice.
Nick Sirianni’s questionable decision-making once again reared its ugly head. In the final drive of this game, the Eagles had all three of their time-outs. Having those timeouts in their pocket made it possible for them to get the ball back in the instance that their last offensive drive stalled out (which it did). It gave them room for error. But on a fourth-down attempt, Sirianni chose to burn that timeout, making it so that if the Eagles did not convert, the game would be over. They did not convert; the game ended.
The 2025 Eagles were never really a contender. They were a deeply flawed team that was incapable of winning the hand when the cards were in their favor. They could not take advantage of a wide-open NFC race by beating an injured team. The cracks that trickled throughout the season finally consumed them.
Their offense is the manifestation of unrealized potential. The nadir of disappointment. They are fundamentally broken. It’s been clear all season that Kevin Patullo is ill-equipped to be an offensive coordinator for a championship team. The time Patullo requires to grow into his role is time that a championship core cannot afford him.
Philadelphia reached the wild-card round of the NFL playoffs, and the offense still never established an identity. They’re playcalling is a collection of disparate ideas. They are 52 cards from separate decks pulled one by one, hoping that maybe this one will work before they toss it away, regardless of the outcome.
Sometimes they run pieces of an under-center offense. Sometimes they go spread empty. And sometimes they run condensed formations where a backup tight end is responsible for key blocks that they simply cannot make. It’s an offense that one pieces together on paper without knowledge of who their talent is and what their strengths are. It’s entry-level. It lacks cohesion, philosophy, or a system of beliefs.
I don’t think Kevin Patullo is entirely to blame for the Eagles’ offensive struggles this season. In this game, there were plenty of opportune play calls that players failed to execute. But at the same time, I know he’s not the solution. This offense is fundamentally and systemically broken. That is not an issue that a first-year offensive coordinator is capable of fixing, nor is Nick Sirianni.
Sirianni, for all of his talents as a detail-oriented teacher, motivator, and culture-builder, has proven that his fatal flaw is recognizing coaching talent. He does not have a John Harbaugh eye for identifying coordinators who can elevate his team. His choice to promote Kevin Patullo wasted a year of a championship core for the opportunity to give a friend a chance. His lack of urgency throughout the season to fix what was broken resulted in a lost season and stretched locker room relationships close to their breaking point.
Sirianni is a coach who needs an experienced playcaller by his side who knows how to maximize offensive talent. A coach who’s been there before, whose voice can be loud enough in the room that it can keep Sirianni from embracing his worst instincts.
So where do we go from here? Through all of the rubble, this team will look different in 2026. The defensive talent will fundamentally shift, with the free agency of players like Jaelan Philips, Nakobe Dean, and Reed Blankenship. The offense should remain consistent, aside from Dallas Goedert, who’s bound to sign a big contract elsewhere. The contract for Jalen Carter will be massive and limit flexibility. The contract decision for Jordan Davis may do the same. The talent advantage will, unfortunately, diminish.
On offense, this loss could force the Eagles to embrace the reinvention they’ve so desperately needed. To let go of the past and embrace the next era of Eagles football. Metamorphosis can be gut-wrenching. But change is the only way you stay ahead in the NFL. Hopefully, a new offensive coordinator can collaborate with Sirianni to modernize this offense and establish the strong identity it’s been lacking.
But for now, this one hurts deeply. It’s a loss that will stay with this fanbase for a long time. The air left the stadium so slowly over the course of three hours that we barely recognized we weren’t breathing. The all too familiar feeling of disappointment, despite recent successes, that’s deeply ingrained in this fanbase crept in once again. The season for the most talented team in the league didn’t end with a bang, but a whisper.
That column says it all.