For the Eagles Top Offense, Eight Seconds Still Fester.
NFL Athletes need to have short memories. Make a great play and enjoy it. Make a key mistake, learn from it and move on while hoping that you still have a career as a professional athlete afterward. Then prepare for the next play.
Just ask James Bradbury, the Eagles cornerback whose late-game game Super Bowl penalty allowed Kansas City to bleed the clock and gave Philadelphia the ball back with only eight seconds left and no timeouts remaining.
The Eagles young offense was dazzling in 2022–2023. No team had more yards in the NFC in 2022, and it seemed at times that their explosive offense was able to break-out on every possession.
The Eagles offense of 2024 — now complete with the addition of All-Pro running back Saquon Barkley — does not dwell on a late season floundering that ended with a late evening listless performance in Tampa Bay in the Wildcard Round of the NFC Playoffs.
But rather, is haunted by one last possession in the Super Bowl that given their potency and perhaps an additional ninety seconds could have given Philadelphia its second World Championship in five years.
The coach who won the Super Bowl that day knew this position before as he peered across the sideline through a sea of red and white confetti that was all too close to instead perhaps having been midnight green in the last moments of Super Bowl at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona.
Twenty years ago, the Eagles had battled the Patriots in Super Bowl XXXIX in Jacksonville all game and were down by a field goal 24–21. Donovan McNabb, Terrell Owens, and Brian Westbrook got the football back with 46 seconds and no timeouts. Much like 2023, the Eagles would not score again that day and lost to New England.
Andy Reid — who had brought the Eagles back to prominence with his first Head Coaching job —would never return to the Super Bowl with the Eagles. Aside from a magical playoff ride in 2009 that ended in Arizona with a monstrous performance by Larry Fitzgerald, The Eagles would never return to Championship form under Reid and would shortly spiral into a needed turnover of the Philadelphia nucleus including parting ways with Donovan McNabb, Brian Dawkins, and Jeremiah Trotter.
The anticipation of yet another Eagles season in 2024 is almost as high as the July sun with Training Camp just on the horizon. Can this Eagles season put away the shadows of the past season of offensive ineptitude and the haunting memories of just eight seconds to avoid the fate of Andy Reid’s Eagles of the late 2000s?
We shall soon see.
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