Giants at Eagles proves the NFC East doesn’t deserve a playoff team
By John Buhler
It doesn’t matter that the Philadelphia Eagles beat the New York Giants on Monday Night Football. The NFC East is awful and doesn’t deserve a playoff team.
It’s happened every so often since 2002’s NFL realignment to include the Houston Texans as an expansion team. 2019 looks to be one of those years where we regret having eight, four-team divisions, where a division winner is not only guaranteed a playoff spot but a home game in the Wild Card round. This year’s most hapless division in football has to be the putrid NFC East.
Monday Night Football between the utterly toothless New York Giants and the definition of football mediocrity in the Philadelphia Eagles gave us all the information we needed about the state of the NFC East. Who cares if the Eagles beat the Giants by a touchdown in overtime at home? This division is terrible and everybody and their brother knows it.
The Eagles are complete playoff frauds and will get waxed by the second-place team in the NFC West in early January if they were to even make the playoffs. Philadelphia was riding a three-game losing streak, including an embarrassing road loss to the Miami Dolphins last week. The Eagles were losers of five of their last seven games. If that’s not lackluster football, then tell me what is?
But with this win over the Giants, who have somehow lost nine games in a row, Philadelphia is still in the mix for an NFC East crown. The Eagles just need to beat their three pathetic division rivals in the final three weeks of the season to raise an empty-calorie banner in their stadium. And that’s assuming America’s most disappointing team in the Dallas Cowboys wins their next two games.
Together, Dallas, Philadelphia, New York and the Washington Redskins complete the Mt. Rushmore of football division sadness. None of them are good and they all stink. The only way these teams will beat anybody the rest of the way is if they are forced to play one another. The 2019 NFC East is on par with the 2010 NFC West and the 2014 NFC South, an unholy triumvirate.
Philadelphia almost lost a game at home to a team that hasn’t won a game since the end of September. Eli Manning actually had to start this game and the ghost of the two-time Super Bowl Champion unleashed two touchdown bombs to wide receiver Darius Slayton. This Eagles secondary is so terrible it gave us the best two quarters we’ve seen out of Manning since 2012.
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Let’s be real for a second. In theory, If you win your division, you should be able to go to the playoffs, even in an embarrassing year like this for the NFC East. That being said, there is no reason two complete playoff frauds like the Cowboys or Eagles should have the right to host a home playoff game against either the San Francisco 49ers or the Seattle Seahawks this season.