Five Straight: The Eagles Are Broken, and Monday Night Made It Official

PHILADELPHIA — I grew up in Camden watching this team teach a whole region how to carry itself. You lose with your jaw set. You win like you expected it. Monday night at the Linc, I watched the Philadelphia Eagles lose their fifth game in a row to the Dallas Cowboys, 38-21, and for the first time in a long time I didn’t recognize the thing I’ve loved since I was eight years old.

This wasn’t a bad bounce. This was a burial.

Javonte Williams ran through the middle of the Eagles defense for 155 yards and a touchdown — a career night, carved out of a front seven that used to make running backs disappear. Dak Prescott barely had to break a sweat, throwing three touchdowns on 15-of-27 passing, two of them to CeeDee Lamb, who strolled into the end zone twice like he had a key to the building. Dallas put up 416 yards. The Eagles managed 321 and gave the ball away once they couldn’t afford to. By the fourth quarter, the green sections of the lower bowl were already thinning out, and the ones who stayed weren’t booing. Booing takes energy. This was quieter than that.

This wasn’t a bad bounce. This was a burial.Samuel Banks

Where the season stands

Let me be honest about where this team is, because nobody in the building wanted to say it out loud. The Eagles are 2-5. They have not won since September. The New York Giants — the Giants — sit atop the NFC East at 4-2-1 while the division Philadelphia has owned sits there for the taking and nobody in midnight green can reach out and grab it.

And the thing is, you can see why. Jalen Hurts is on injured reserve with a blood clot in his calf, and he isn’t walking back through that door for weeks. Saquon Barkley, the man who ran for over 2,000 yards two seasons ago, left Monday’s game early when his back locked up, in his first game back after missing two with a hamstring injury. DeVonta Smith didn’t play at all. The injury report reads like a eulogy for a contender.

That left Tanner McKee, and I want to be fair to the kid, because none of this is on him. He went 23-of-35 for 211 yards, threw a touchdown to rookie Makai Lemon and an interception that told you everything about how little room for error he’s got. Dameon Pierce punched in a short one. Twenty-one points. Against this Cowboys team, in a rivalry game, at home, that’s not enough and everybody in South Jersey knows it isn’t.

A roster in the training room

Here’s what I keep coming back to. The Eagles are not losing because they quit. They’re losing because the spine of the roster is in a training room, and a franchise that spent years building a cushion of talent is finding out exactly how thin the cushion got. The offense has been sputtering for weeks, and Monday didn’t change that math.

So where does that leave us — the people who live and die with this team from Camden to Cape May, who schedule Sundays around it, who taught our kids the fight song before they could read? It leaves us where Eagles fans have always been best: holding on. This region didn’t fall in love with the Birds because they were easy. We fell in love because they were ours, in the lean years and the parade years both.

Hurts will come back. Barkley will heal. The schedule will soften. But right now, tonight, this is a 2-5 football team that got run off its own field by Dallas, and pretending otherwise insults a fan base that can read a scoreboard. The standard in this city is the standard whether the roster’s whole or not. Five straight losses doesn’t lower it. It just tells you how far there is to climb.

They climb from here, or they don’t. Either way, Camden will be watching.

Based on reporting from FOX Sports, RotoWire, TSN and NBC Sports Philadelphia.