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In just under a week’s time, the Philadelphia Eagles will be back on an NFL field for the first game of the 2025 season.
Soon, fans will find out if the reigning and defending Super Bowl champions are legit, having used their win to get even meaner despite losing multiple key starters from last year’s run, or if they simply didn’t try hard enough to keep their winning core together, with 2025’s results looking a bit too much like 2018’s.
For pessimistic fans, things aren’t looking good, as losing a half-dozen starters plus an offensive coordinator is a tough pill to swallow. But even if the Eagles will have to plan, practice, and ultimately play a little differently than they have in the past doesn’t mean they can’t still be very effective. No, with a summer to get back on track and figure things out, who knows, maybe the Eagles will still return to the Super Bowl next February, even if they look a little different getting there.
After a rough end to the 2023 NFL season, the Eagles found themselves in a very advantageous position heading into their eventual Super Bowl run.
For one thing, the team had a second-place schedule, a nice side effect of finishing behind the Dallas Cowboys while they still had Micah Parsons. They also faced off against the NFC South, a division widely considered one of the worst in football, to go with out-of-division contests against the Pittsburgh Steelers, the Jacksonville Jaguars, and the Los Angeles Rams.
While the Eagles had some issues early on, with some calling for Nick Sirianni’s job after a 2-2 start with losses to the Atlanta Falcons and Tampa Bay Buccaneers, they committed to the run after their Week 5 bye and never looked back, going 12-1 down the stretch, including a perfect record in games started and finished by Jalen Hurts.
In 2025, things get a bit more challenging.
Right off the top, four of the Eagles’ first five opponents were playoff teams last year, with the Kansas City Chiefs on the books in Week 2, the Los Angeles Rams coming to town in Week 3, the always challenging Buccaneers in Week 4, and the deceptively talented Denver Broncos finishing off the tour on October 5. While the Eagles get three easy games before the bye, the New York Giants, the Minnesota Vikings, and the New York Giants again, there are still multiple tough games in the second half of the season, including the Green Bay Packers, the Detroit Lions, and the Buffalo Bills, all challenging for the Eagles’ Super Bowl title.
With such a schedule, even if the Eagles split those seven games, that would still leave them with more losses than 2024 at 3.5, with an always tough Washington Commanders squad capable of taking a game in the division, maybe even two.
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