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The Packers need to take some major steps if they’re going to match the Eagles’ Super Bowl success.
Stealing from the Super Bowl winners is so baked into football it’s practically written into the NFL bylaws. When you win it all, people will try to imitate everything you do, hiring your coaches away and even signing your former players to try to recapture whatever fumes of glory may be leftover from a championship run.
Pathetic, right?
Yeah, so let’s do that with the Eagles. How can the Packers learn from the Eagles and adopt fine-tune their approach to get themselves over the top?
For starters, let’s acknowledge that this is a fraught and tenuous proposition. Stealing from the best is easy to talk about but hard to do. If it were as straightforward as hijacking coaches and players, the Patriots would have been stripped for parts by 2010. Every Super Bowl team is uniquely special and trying to recreate one is going to leave you disappointed as often as not. Saying “just do what the Eagles do” is not a solution and it’s barely a plan.
But that aside, I think it’s encouraging that there are some broad similarities between the Packers and the Eagles. Both have strong offensive lines built largely through savvy draft manipulation. Only two home-grown first-round picks started a game this year for either team: Jordan Morgan was in the starting lineup for one game in Green Bay, while Lane Taylor has been a fixture for Philadelphia since 2013. Outside of that, though, every lineman in Green Bay and Philadelphia was either a free agent signing or no higher than a second-round pick.
Both teams also invested heavily at running back this offseason. Saquon Barkley tore through the NFL in the regular season and somehow got even better in the postseason, and Kansas City selling out to stop him was a big reason for Philadelphia’s passing success in the Super Bowl. Josh Jacobs, meanwhile, had a fine season in Green Bay and seems poised to shoulder the load at least in 2025 and 2026, possibly beyond. Even outside of Jacobs, the Packers clearly value the position and have a deep stable of backs heading into next season.
The two teams are also both set at quarterback. Jordan Love hasn’t yet had the postseason success that Jalen Hurts has, but the Packers are committed to him and there’s a solid body of statistical evidence showing he’s already among the better quarterbacks in the league and improving year over year. If the Eagles can win with Hurts, the Packers can probably do it with Love.
The similarities break down a bit on defense, where the Eagles are clearly more talented. However, though he’s not in the same ballpark as Vic Fangio, the Packers have their own innovative and aggressive defensive coordinator in Jeff Hafley. Could the Packers defense be as good as the Eagles if they gave Hafley the same pieces? It’s impossible to say, but he did...
