NFL franchise all-time power rankings: Which organization comes out on top?
By Nick Villano
12. Philadelphia Eagles
It would have been incredibly hard to rank the Philadelphia Eagles if not for the 2017 season. Without a Super Bowl, this team should have a terrible legacy, but the Eagles have been a successful franchise outside that one particular game. They’ve been in the playoffs almost every year of the 2000s, and they’ve won playoff games in 10 different seasons this century.
The Eagles early history is awful. The Eagles have three first-overall picks in the NFL Draft, and they all came before 1950. From 1933 to 1943, they failed to win more than five games in a season and often won between one and three games. This is why their all-time record is so skewed. They eventually turned it around, winning back-to-back NFL Championships in 1948 and 1949. They also won the NFL Championship in 1960.
This was the end of a great era, as the Eagles went 18 seasons before making the playoffs again. They finally made a Super Bowl in 1980 on the back of Ron Jaworski’s best season. Their defense was fantastic, but it wasn’t enough to win it all. Then, there’s the Donovan McNabb-Andy Reid era that saw a ton of winning but also a ton of losing in the biggest moments. They made the NFC Championship Game four years in a row, finally getting over the hump and making the Super Bowl in 2003-04. They lost to the Patriots, but it was considered a step in the right direction.
It wasn’t, and the Eagles kept losing in the playoffs until Reid was fired and McNabb was traded to Washington. There was some pain afterward, including Michael Vick’s talent drop and the strange Chip Kelly era. Yet, it was all worth it in 2017 when Nick Foles found some wild elixir to become the best quarterback in the league for a month. He beat Tom Brady in an offensive shootout in Super Bowl LII. Not many players in history can say that, let alone do it in the Super Bowl. The Eagles seem built to do it again, making the Super Bowl in 2023 and having a foundation to win. They may make it into the top 10 within a few years.