Crossing Broad
The prevailing thought after Super Bowl 59 is that we watched the greatest Eagles performance of all time, to complete the greatest season in franchise history. There’s no legitimate argument against it.
This team went out and throttled the two-time defending champions, sacked Patrick Mahomes six times, and ragdolled their offensive line. It got so bad in the fourth quarter that the Kansas City Chiefs were chasing garbage time stats while Kenny Pickett was taking snaps. It was the most comprehensive big game performance we’ve ever seen from an Eagles team, completing an 18-3 season that would have been 19-2 if not for a Jalen Hurts concussion in Washington.
Obviously this puts them above the only other team to win a Super Bowl, which is Nick Foles’ 2017 squad. As special as that victory was, Jim Schwartz’s defense gave up 613 yards to the Patriots and only a miracle play from Brandon Graham sealed the win. Because of the way each team finished the job, the 2024 squad has to rank ahead of the 2017 squad.
So you begin to ask yourself if any other team in Philadelphia sports history has come close to doing what this team did, and we start by narrowing the field to championship winners going back to 1970. There is absolutely no disrespect to the great squads that won titles before 1970; there just aren’t enough people alive in 2025 who clearly remember watching those teams play, which makes it impossible to do a fair and legitimate comparison. We’ll leave teams like the 1960 Eagles and 1967 Sixers in a separate category. For this exercise, these title-winning teams will be the focus group:
The first team that jumps off the screen and slaps you in the face is 1983 76ers, who went 65-17 and 12-1 in the postseason, sweeping the Lakers for the title. It’s hard to imagine the Fo’ Fo’ Fo’ Sixers ever being topped in terms of utter domination. They finished with a 79.2 regular-season winning percentage and rampaged through the playoffs with four double-digit wins. If you add up all of the games, it’s 77 wins out of 95 games. That is an incredible 81% percent of games won. There likely will not be a Sixers team that ever replicates what was done by Moses Malone, Dr. J, Andrew Money, Mo Cheeks, and underrated company.
From there, you go to the Phillies squads of 1980 and 2008, which won 91 and 92 regular season games, respectively. Mike Schmidt, Steve Carlton, and a stacked roster won those playoff series 3-2 and 4-2, while the ’08 Phils went 3-1, 3-1, and 4-1. As good as those teams were, they didn’t dominate to the level of this Eagles team or that Sixers team, so at best you’d probably have them in tier 1B or tier 2.
For the Flyers...
