I forgot to rail against this last week, so on the eve of a game that decides whether the Eagles bury themselves at 0-2 or jump right back in it all at 1-1 I must bring up an article Dave Spadaro wrote on the Eagles website after last week's game.
Reminder That It's A Marathon, Not A Sprint ...
No it's NOT a marathon!!! This is football. That tired old sports cliche may apply just fine to baseball, hockey, or basketball where it truly is a marathon. In the grand scheme of things one game rarely makes all that much a difference in a 162 or 80+ game season, but it damn sure makes a difference in a 16 game season. One Eagles loss is like the Phillies losing 10 or 11 games in a row. Now if a baseball team lost 11 games in a row you can bet there'd be alot of people panicking and worrying about their playoff chances.
The Phillies are 4 games behind the Mets in the final month of the season. It's a tough, but not insurmountable. If the Eagles trailed the Giants by 4 games in final month of the season, it's over! We are thinking about how good a draft pick we'll be getting. The difference between 8-8 and 9-7 could be a playoff spot. 10-6 and 11-5 or 12-4 could mean a home game or a bye week in the postseason. I'm sorry Dave and I know what you're trying to say, that the Eagles have turned around bad starts before... but the NFL season most definitely is a sprint. Every game is incredibly important. The bad little loss we had early last year against the Giants or Bucs was the difference between getting a week off and a home game against the Saints last year. Had we won both of those games we may have had home field throughout!
So, I certainly hope as we head into tonight's game that the Eagles team doesn't have the same mindset that the Eagles media dept does. As we learned last year, these early games could easily be the difference between winning a superbowl and going home early again.