Ranking NFC opponents by how much Eagles fans hate them

Sports hate is a beautiful thing. It’s pure, and it transcends time and space. Philadelphia Eagles fans get a bad rap about it, too. Have there been times when some people have gone too far? Of course, but that happens for every fan base.

That’s not to say the Eagles fans' hatred isn’t there. If a team comes into the Linc, they’re going to get chirped, and they're going to get chirped a lot. It’s not always personal. Sometimes players and teams get an earful purely because their job is to win, and their winning is in exact opposition to my mental health. Do we hate you that day? Yes, but once you get on a plane and go back to Buffalo, we don’t think about you anymore. 

This isn’t about those teams. This is about the teams where it is personal. This is about that pure, unbridled hatred. 

This is an offseason-long Dallas Week

Like most things in life, there are tiers and classifications to hate. Sometimes your beef is with players, sometimes it's with the franchise, sometimes it's with the fans, and sometimes it’s all of those jumbled together. 

This is a ranking of the NFC teams that the Eagles are playing this year, where the hate is real. Unfortunately, it doesn’t include the 49ers or the Saints, who are both unbelievably detestable. 

I remember what you took from me:
Tampa Bay Buccaneers

You might think that the Buccaneers should be on this list because they’ve knocked the Eagles out of the postseason twice in the past four years, but that’s not it. In 2021, it was Jalen Hurts’ first year as a starter, and the expectations weren’t really high. The hate towards that version of the Buccs was directed at Tom Brady.

Then, in 2023, the Buccs knocked the Eagles out, but that was at the end of the collapse and it felt more like a mercy killing. Also, that was Baker Mayfield’s team, and any team with Baker Mayfield is a relatively likable team. 

They’re on the list because of January 19, 2003: the last Eagles game at The Vet. It was the NFC Championship game of the 2002 season. In the fourth quarter, the Eagles were down 10 points, but they were on the verge of making a comeback.

On a first and goal from Tampa’s 10-yard line, Donovan McNabb threw an interception that Ronde Barber returned for 92 yards, and ruined the stadium’s farewell. It’s been over 20 years since that happened, but you don’t forget, nor forgive, teams who take away a season and a stadium. 

It’s on sight:
Packers

The general theme in all sports is to outmaneuver (in some sort) your opponent. If they are doing something and it’s working, then you change what you are doing to stop them. That’s especially true in football, and it’s the reason there are so many waves of offensive and defensive schemes that become popular every handful of years.

The Packers took the coward’s path when they tried, and failed, to ban the Tush Push. Instead of trying to be a better football team and win on the field, they took the coward’s path and went the litigious-adjacent route.

Jordan Love seems like a nice guy. Matt LaFleur sounded like he didn’t have the same feelings about banning the Shove as his owner. Josh Jacobs is just a respectable running back who finally got out of the hellhole in Las Vegas.

None of that matters; the Packers are cowards, and they deserve everything bad that comes to them. 

Get back in the dirt:
Commanders

There was some dweeby kid that you knew who got either a new bike, a new pair of cleats, or a holographic Pikachu card and then thought they were the king of the world because someone said, ‘Hey, did you see Blake’s new ____?”

That’s the Commanders. They got a good quarterback for the first time in a decade, and now their fans think that they are the big dogs. They, objectively, are not. 

After they beat the Kenny Pickett-led Eagles in Week 16 last season, they thought they took down Goliath, when in reality, they kind of just pump-faked the biggest guy in prison. Then, going into the NFC Championship Game, their fans did the unthinkable: they took over the Hard Rock Cafe in Philadelphia. That’s a mega loser move.

We don’t hate them because they're losers; we hate them because they’re division rivals and because they think they're better than they are. Which is a recurring theme with the teams in this division.

Uppity schmucks:
Giants

Some teams want to win championships, and some teams want to give off the appearance of a team that wants to win championships. The Giants are the latter. They pride themselves on being a ‘holier than thou’ classy organization that plays ‘Giants Football’, and that alone is detestable. 

It’s not just that, though. Since the start of the 2001 season, the Eagles have a 37-14 record against the Giants. But before that, it wasn’t so peachy. 

Up until that season, the Giants had a pretty dominant upper hand and a series record of 58-74-2, and it was all capped off when they beat the Eagles 20-10 in the divisional round of the 2000 season.

Lately, the Giants have just been a pathetic team with an incredibly punchable face, but there was a time when this rivalry was the rivalry. It might seem like dunking on the Giants is punching down, and it is, but it’s a deserved punch-down. 

Loathing:
Cowboys

Everything about the Cowboys is the worst. The bad players, the terrible ownership, the collapsing stadium, the non-ball-knowing fans… all of it. The problem is that when they were good 30-ish years ago, a whole bunch of dorks jumped on that bandwagon, and now that fandom has spread like a slack-jawed plague.

The problem is that lame media leeches onto teams with big and/or engaged fan bases. You know why you see a bunch of quarterback rankings with Jalen Hurts out of the top 10? It’s because the Eagles have an incredibly engaged fanbase, and those people are farming for clicks. It’s the same reason First Take and every other bad TV show focuses on the Cowboys.

The age to legally rent a car is 25. The current, pathetic version of the Cowboys was able to rent a car three years ago. Any other team, in the world, that has been out of serious contention for very close to 30 years would never get talked about by any reasonable person.

But it’s the Cowboys and Jerry Jones has built such a tremendous brand of mediocrity and below average performance that so many morons buy into. And because of that, doofuses on TV shows have no choice but to play into said morons’ delusions of grandeur. It’s pathetic and wholly aggravating.

Simply put, the Cowboys are the guy who bullied you in preschool, and now they’re just some guy living under a bridge, but he likes to remind you of the time he stole your Capri Sun 30 years ago. They’ll fool some people during the regular season by winning 10 games, but they die in the playoffs; the guy under the bridge will weasel his way into a job interview at Edward Jones, but he’ll walk into the board room, and a catastrophic IBS flare-up will gross everyone out.

The one good thing the Cowboys have offered society is that on every third Thursday of November, when your entire family gets together to dog-cuss them. There’s nothing else that’s special about that day.