With an incredibly disappointing home playoff loss to the Seattle Seahawks, the Eagles saw their equally-disappointing 2019 season come to a close.

It was a season comprised seemingly entirely of peaks and valleys. Nothing in between. Not consistently bad. Not consistently good. Slightly more good than bad. Just enough to win the weakest division in the league.

In a way, I’m glad the season is over. It’s more time for Howie to (fingers-crossed, properly) evaluate how he needs to address the team’s needs in the offseason. It’s less time for what must be the worst medical staff in the NFL to get any more of our players hurt.

Here are some positives from this season:

Make no mistake, Carson Wentz is a franchise QB. He is a stud. Think about how many *bad* touchdown drops there were this season. If half of those are caught, Wentz’s name is right there with Jackson and Wilson in the MVP race. The Eagles have the best QB in their division, and he will spend much of his career as a top-5 QB in the NFL. Having a QB that good is enough to win you 7 or 8 games every year, alone. The Eagles have their answer at the most-important singular position in American sports.

Miles Sanders. What a second half he had. In what became a running trend, it unfortunately took an injury to the guy ahead of him for Miles to get enough playing time and find some sort of rhythm, but once he did, what a rhythm it was. I spent the first third of the season roasting Howie for what I felt was wasting a 2nd round pick on a runningback who wasn’t even playing, but I am happily on the Sanders-Apology-Tour now. He’ll be Wentz’s literal right-hand man for a generation.

I attended the University of Pittsburgh from 2014-2018. At the end of my freshman year, the Pitt Panthers would play the University of Houston in the Armed Forces Bowl. In that game, Pitt blew an astounding 4th Qtr lead, facilitated by at least one successful Houston onside kick, and Houston won 35-34. Houston’s QB was a classic college-stud-with-no-pro-future; great at bullying college defenders around, but with a skillset that just wouldn’t play at a faster, stronger, and smarter level. Then one offseason I found out we’d signed that QB to our practice squad to play wide receiver. Greg Ward Jr. was, perhaps given how far he’d come, the brightest spot on this team. His play down the stretch and chemistry with Wentz can not be overstated. He has earned a spot on next year’s opening day roster.
What I want to caution fans against is thinking he is any more than what he is. Ward Jr. is a fine slot receiver, a guy to move the sticks and poach a redzone target here and there. If he begins next season as the Eagles’ 2nd-best WR, Howie will have failed yet again to build an acceptable offense around Wentz. I look at it this way – Jason Avant and Hank Baskett had established roles on some good Eagles teams. I need Ward Jr. to be just that.

The last pro is something we’ve known for a while, but are prone to forgetting during the hard times. Doug Pederson is an excellent coach, and while he clearly has areas of weakness, I’ll put it this way: you will not find an upgrade over Doug Pederson, be it in house, or available on the coaching market. Something about that man makes players give their most in the biggest situations. You can’t ask for any more than that.


And now for the part I’ve looked forward to most: the negatives.

The medical staff shouldn’t be allowed back in the stadium tomorrow morning. I genuinely believe that our players would be in better health using Tom Brady’s quack doctor for treatment. Some teams get unlucky, for one year. But this is two years in a row with way too many people getting hurt. That’s a pattern. They need to improve here, immediately.

The coordinators. Oh my god. I don’t know how you can do worse. Mike Groh, once fired by his own father at UVA, is the least imaginative OC in football at any level. Is there any doubt in any of our minds that we’re running the ball on 2nd and long? A handful of times every game, you see a play call that doesn’t even fall under “bad.” More accurate would be “doesn’t belong in an NFL playbook.” Lots of people have talked about how poor a decision it was to automatically promote internally following the departures of Reich and Flip, but it never gets old, because Groh is always doing something ill-timed and unsuccessful. The Eagles will be better without him.

And don’t forget my favorite punching bag, Jim Schwartz. You know, it’s not that the D is getting constantly lit up. It doesn’t. But it always seems like Schwartz’s squad is allowing just enough to make it a game. We score 24, they score 20. We score 17, they score 15. We score 21, they score 27. And we all know that there’s never been a safer bet than for the other team to score, right after we’ve seized the momentum by scoring. What the hell is Schwartz’s problem? At a certain point, you gotta watch teams converting 3rd-and-long with so much regularity that you say, “Hmm, maybe I’d better change something.” Not Schwartz. For the millionth time, none of you will ever convince me that the Eagles didn’t win that Super Bowl in spite of him.

The final con is the guy at the top, Howie Roseman. Like Schwartz, he’ll always have been the first guy to win the championship here, but wow has he looked lost without Joe Douglas. This next draft should absolutely be scrutinized thoroughly. He has to NAIL half his picks to keep this team competitive. The good thing is that nothing can take away that first Trophy, but he’s risking it becoming the Last trophy. You can’t take a 3-year gap in between taking o-linemen with high draft picks. You can’t bring in 2nd-round wideouts who aren’t even good enough to get on the field ahead of undrafted free agents.

This year, given the adversity the Eagles faced, should be looked at as a positive. The next task they face is making up the ground between them and teams like Seattle, Green Bay, and San Francisco at the top. Cheers to the offseason ahead of us, my fellow fans.