It’s a familiarly unfamiliar feeling with the Philadelphia Eagles right now. A couple of weeks ago, training camp started, and excitement was at an all-time high. Then, after the first preseason game, the collective energy was, ‘Can we maybe fast-forward to real football?’ THEN, Landon Dickerson went down with a meniscus thing, and now you’re googling if it's safe to be in a self-induced coma for the next three weeks (it’s not).
So it’s familiar that you’re ready for ball, but it’s unfamiliar to have a roster and coaching staff that’s this stable. It’s incredible how far this team has come in just one calendar year.
An Eagles Time Machine: back to August 2024
The Eagles are in a great spot right now, but if you hopped into the time machine and pressed the ‘backward’ button 365 times, it’d be a different story. You’d step out of that time machine with a great big smile on your face. While you were going to the bank to take out a second mortgage on your house, and put your life on Eagles to win Super Bowl LIX (it was around +1200) and Saquon Barkley to win Offensive Player of the Year (+2000), these are some of the things people would be talking about.
A broken relationship
On the last day of the 2024 spring mini camp, Jalen Hurts was asked, “What have you noticed about Nick being open-minded to change up the offense like he has? What does that say about him?” Hurts answered, “I mean, that's a great question. I don't know that I know the answer to it.”
That answer started a discussion that went pretty deep into the season: Does Jalen Hurts hate Nick Sirianni?
On August 7th, 2024, ESPN’s Tim McManus and Jeremy Fowler wrote a piece about that relationship, and by their reporting… yeah, he might’ve hated Sirianni. Winning does cure all, and it really feels like that’s not the case anymore.
Sirianni’s going out and blasting people who think Hurts isn’t the guy, and now we’ve got the Eagles All-Access from the Super Bowl ring ceremony.
What a moment between Nick Sirianni and Jalen Hurts at the Eagles ring ceremony
— Eagles Ed💍💍 (@EdFromDelco) August 5, 2025
“You ready?”
“Let’s do it. One at a time. Win one at a time.”#FlyEaglesFly pic.twitter.com/vpUetu8zPq
Those are two dudes who love each other, and no one can tell me that they don’t… or you can, and I just won’t believe you. It’s just super nice that there hasn’t been any dumb drama or anything like that this offseason.
Quinyon Mitchell at nickel
Cooper DeJean still wasn’t at practice yet, so the defensive backfield was the Quinyon Mitchell show. It was pretty clear from the jump that if Vic Fangio wanted to have the best 11 players on the field, Mitchell needed to be one of them.
Because of that, he’d been getting practice and preseason snaps at both nickel corner and outside corner (he ended up playing only 11 snaps from the slot all season). We know how that whole thing went with Avonte Maddox and DeJean, but it’s still kind of interesting that they’re almost in the same situation again this season.
Now, if the defense wants to have the best 11 players on the field, one of them needs to be DeJean. This year, the decision is the same as last year, but kind of just the opposite. DeJean’s an awesome nickel, but he can also play safety at a high level.
If he goes to safety, there's a possibility the rookie Mac McWilliams, who’s been having a good training camp, could come in at nickel… But when I went back and listened to Vic talk in a press conference a year ago, he said something that was pretty interesting.
A reporter asked him about the difference between the nickel corner and the outside corner. Fangio said, “Well, corner is corner. I think we all know that… nickel is essentially a linebacker position. You know, if you go back to the traditional 4-3, if you stayed in a 4-3, a linebacker would be walked out on that slot. Well, the linebacker leaves the game, and now you’re in nickel, and the nickel is on that slot. So essentially, when you pare it down, he’s playing linebacker-type zones more involved at the run than a corner is. So, it’s a drastically different position.”
One thing that made DeJean so good at it last year is that he’s a hoss. He’s six feet tall and right around 200 pounds. Mac McWilliams isn’t quite that same size, at five feet and ten inches tall, and around 190 pounds.
Obviously, size isn’t everything, but it is definitely something. You can have smaller guys who play like bigger guys, and they can be effective. Take Avonte Maddox: he’s a smaller guy, but he hit like a truck… the problem is the whole physics thing, and his body wasn’t able to hold up.
So sure, McWilliams definitely could be the Eagles' designated nickel corner, and DeJean could line up with Reed Blankenship at safety every play, but I’d bet Fangio’s not cool with that. Also, McWilliams has been getting training camp and preseason reps at outside corner as well, so it’s a tricky situation.
A bonus from that press conference on August 11, 2024, was that Fangio did seemingly predict the future. When he was asked about his blitzing philosophy, he said, “You want to blitz when you want to, and you think it’s appropriate. You don’t want to blitz because you feel you have to… We’ll have games where we hardly do it, and we’ll have games where we do it a lot.”
Fast forward six months, and in the Super Bowl, the Eagles sacked Patrick Mahomes six times without blitzing at all.
Jake Elliott missed kicks
One huge story of the 2024 season was Jake Elliott’s terrible kicking. In the regular season, he was 28-of-36 on field goals and just one-of-seven on field goals over 50 yards. It was bad, and it was something that lingered in the back of your mind during the postseason.
Luckily, it was never a massive issue there. He was 10-of-11 on field goals, but he was 13-of-16 on extra points... And two of those extra point misses were during the divisional game against the Rams.
Looking back, it was kind of foreshadowed in the Eagles' first preseason game of the 2024 season. He was one-of-two on both field goals and extra points. That includes misses on his first extra point attempt and his first field goal attempt (which was a 50-yarder).
He ended up getting a chance at a 49-yarder immediately after that (Patrick Johnson strip sack on the next play) and made it, but it was still a little hairy.
Sirianni was asked about the misses after that game. He said, “Hopefully, we got those out of our way... I’m so confident in him… I trust him so much, and I’m so glad he got another opportunity. I have no doubt he will be even better because of some of the adversity that he went through today.”
Well… yeah. That’s not what happened.
Now, we kind of got a little explanation about his struggles. On the post-Super Bowl episode of Green Light with Chris Long, Beau Allen said, “Jake Elliott battled through adversity this year. He wasn’t his same consistent self that he’s been, and some of that is due to an injury that’s not reported. I tell you that because I love that guy. I was talking to him about it, and he’s a grinder…”
Cross your fingers that Elliot is past all of that now. He had the worst season of his career in 2020 (14-of-19) and bounced all the way back in 2021 (30-of-33). There’s definitely been a change of guard with the top kickers in the NFL, and hopefully he can hang on for another year.
Tanner McKee deserves to be QB2
The Eagles traded for Kenny Pickett on March 16th, 2024… and boy oh boy, did that end up being meaningless. We had seen Tanner McKee do pretty well in the 2023 preseason behind Marcus Mariota, and it felt like Howie Roseman was going to be cool with having McKee be the QB2 in 2024.
Then, in the preseason, McKee outplayed Pickett, but it was all for naught. Sirianni and/or Howie Roseman said that Pickett was going to be QB2. Was that because they liked what Pickett had to offer, was it because they didn’t trust McKee, or was it because they had trade capital invested in Pickett? We’ll never know, but it was definitely the third option.
Luckily, here we are, in August of 2025, and McKee has taken his rightful place at QB2 on the Eagles depth chart… and not only that, but he’s splashing and raising his price for next offseason every single week. You truly, truly love to see it.