Now Barkley’s Hurting Too: Reeling Eagles Limp Into Prime Time

PHILADELPHIA — Five in a row. Let that sit for a second if you’re an Eagles fan in South Jersey, because I know it isn’t sitting easy. The last time the Birds won a football game, the calendar still said September. Now it’s Halloween weekend, the record reads 2-5, and the one constant that was supposed to hold this offense together while Jalen Hurts recovers is suddenly on the injury report with the rest of them.

Two days on the sideline

Saquon Barkley did not practice on Wednesday. He did not practice on Thursday. Reporters didn’t spot him on the practice field at all, which is the last thing a 2-5 team wants to see from the best player on its roster. Barkley went into Monday night’s 38-21 loss in Dallas still nursing a hamstring injury that had kept him out, tweaked his back on a first-quarter run, was done after nine touches, and told reporters afterward he didn’t think the back would cost him a game. Two days of missed work later, that confidence is looking optimistic. Friday is his last window to get on the field before the team decides, and in Philadelphia we have learned to read those silences.

Here’s the brutal part. The Eagles don’t get to catch their breath. They fly to Landover to face the Washington Commanders on Sunday night — 8:20 kickoff, Northwest Stadium, the whole country tuned to NBC. Prime time. The window America uses to check in on the teams that matter. And what America is going to see is a franchise that two years ago felt like the class of the NFC now starting Tanner McKee behind a banged-up line, handing off to whoever’s healthy, and trying to prove it still has a pulse.

McKee can’t do it alone

I want to be fair to McKee, because none of this is on him. The kid got thrown into an impossible spot when Hurts was shut down for the season — blood clots in his lungs, a scare that makes a football game feel very small — and he has carried himself like a pro. But a backup quarterback making his third start of the season cannot win games by himself, and if Barkley can’t go, Philadelphia is asking a backup passer to outscore people with a backfield held together by tape and prayer. That’s not a plan. That’s a hope.

The one winnable night

The one mercy on the schedule is the opponent. Washington comes in at 1-4-1, a tie in there somewhere that tells you everything about the kind of autumn the NFC East is having. This is the game you circle when you’re desperate — the one winnable night in a brutal stretch. Which is exactly why Sunday matters more than the standings suggest. Beat a struggling Commanders team on national television and maybe, just maybe, you stop the bleeding and remember what winning football feels like before December. Lose it, and a 2-5 season becomes a 2-6 season that nobody in this region will be able to talk themselves out of.

This is the game you circle when you’re desperate — the one winnable night in a brutal stretch.Samuel Banks

I grew up in Camden watching this team teach grown men how to hope and how to hurt, usually in the same afternoon. South Jersey doesn’t quit on the Eagles in a five-game skid — that’s not who we are. But we’re also not naive. We can see a team running out of healthy bodies and road left on the schedule.

Sunday night, under the lights, we find out whether there’s any fight left in this thing. For a lot of households from Cherry Hill to Vineland, that’ll be the only reason the TV stays on.

Based on reporting from The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Athletic, and NFL.com.