Philadelphia Eagles news: Playing starters, 2025 schedule, and the No. 7 seed

The news about the Philadelphia Eagles this week is almost entirely about Saquon Barkley’s potential to break the NFL single-season rushing record, and it should be. It’s a monumental possibility that we’re looking at, and the only person who doesn’t want it to happen is Eric Dickerson.

We’ll get to that news and what Sirianni said about playing the starters, but first, we’re going to look at a couple of other things that have come up since the Eagles beat the will to compete out of the Cowboys last Sunday.

An unfavorable Sunday

In Week 18, the Minnesota Vikings beat the Green Bay Packers and the Washington Commanders beat the Atlanta Falcons. Those games shook things up at the bottom of the NFC playoff picture, and not necessarily in a good way.

It used to look like it was a sure thing that the Eagles would play the Commanders in the Wild Card round. Now, it’s almost a sure thing that it’ll be the Packers. 

In Week 18, if the Commanders beat the Cowboys (which seems likely), or the Cowboys beat the Commanders AND the Bears beat the Packers (which seems unlikely), Washington will be the sixth seed and the Eagles will play the Packers. 

If the Cowboys beat the Commanders AND the Packers beat the Bears, Washington will be the seventh seed and the Eagles will play them.

There are two schools of thought on this:

The first is that you want an easier path to the NFC Championship Game. The Commanders offer that. Yeah, they beat the Eagles in Week 16, but that was without Jalen Hurts for most of the game. When the Eagles QB1 was in the game, the offense started hotter than we’ve seen this season.

On top of that, Jayden Daniels is a rookie. There have been only eight rookie quarterbacks to win playoff games in the past 20 years. It’d be cool if the Eagles had the opportunity to give Daniels a baptism-by-fire. 

The Packers’ quarterback Jordan Love isn’t a rookie and he’s shown that he’s got the stones to win in the postseason and make it look pretty. Green Bay looked pretty pedestrian in Week 17, but we know they can flip the switch.

The second school of thought is, ‘Who cares?’ which is fair. Play the teams you play, beat them, and advance. The goal here is to win a Super Bowl. You’re going to have to play good teams to do that. 

A bonus to playing good teams is that it means the Eagles could be underdogs, and when the Eagles are underdogs, we get to break out the Dog Masks. Those are always the best days. 

The 2025 schedule looks rough

Everything is pretty much set for when it comes to knowing who the Eagles are going to play in 2025. We’ll still have to wait until next summer to find out the actual schedule, but we do know almost every opponent that the Eagles will see. 

Jimmy Kempski of PhillyVoice wrote, “They will play the entirety of the NFC North and the AFC West, as well as the first-place finishers in the NFC West, AFC East, and NFC South.”

That means the Eagles won’t see any teams from the AFC North and South, which is both good and bad. Sure, this year they swept the entirety of the AFC North, but some teams in that division are good year in and year out. It’s a bummer that they don’t get any teams from the AFC South because they’re pretty much the exact opposite of the AFC North; just like, almost always bad year in and year out.

The only team that we don’t know of is whoever wins the NFC South. It’ll either be the Falcons or the Buccaneers. If it’s the Buccaneers, it’ll be the third straight year the Eagles have played them.

Kempski also listed the home and away teams, in no particular order, this is what the matchups will look like (excluding NFC East teams): 

That’s tough. That’s really tough. After the 2023 season, we, as a society, banned the term ‘gauntlet’ because it was wildly overused whenever anyone talked about the Eagles’ schedule. That ban might have to be lifted based on the sheer number of powerhouses on that list.

We’ll find out about the starters before Sunday, maybe

It can be tough to parse out a Nick Sirianni press conference. Lately, he’s been more honest than not, but every once in a while he’ll say something that is blatantly incorrect. Most recently he implied that Braden Mann was going to keep doing kickoffs by saying that his bad performance in Week 16 was due to the weather and that the team liked how Braden was doing… Jake Elliott then did all the kickoffs in Week 17. Nick likes to get a competitive advantage anywhere he can, even if it’s saying, ‘The guy who did a bad job is going to keep doing a bad job, even though we have a guy who can do the same job, but better.’

So, yeah… whatever. 

The biggest question this week is about whether or not the offensive starters will play so that Saquon can break the NFL’s single-season rushing record. Nick was asked about that almost immediately in his media availability on Monday afternoon. 

Nick said, “I gave the players off today. They’ll be back in a couple of days… I’ll always inform them before I inform anybody else… I know you guys are gonna want that answer as soon as you guys can get it. I’ll try to help you do your jobs as much as I possibly can, but I’ll always inform our players of things first. Still sorting through things right now at this particular moment.” (1:02 in the video below)

This is purely speculation, but it feels like the part about letting everyone know ahead of time is the truthful part. The part about him still sorting things out and mulling it over seems like it’s not true. 

But knowing what we know about Nick, there can be videos of all of the starters standing off to the side of practice with absolutely no intention of participating, and he’ll say that it’s still up in the air. Then the injury report will come out with eight players listed as “out” for rest, and Nick will assure everyone that the game plan is still the same. Hopefully, that’s not the case, but nothing is off the table. 

The best bet now is to take Nick for his word: he’ll let everyone know ahead of the game. You’ll be able to decide whether or not to put Saquon in your fantasy lineup if you’re one of those weirdos in a league that plays all 18 weeks.