Final Eagles locker room speeches from Doug Pederson and Malcolm Jenkins set the right message

The Philadelphia Eagles did something unique on Tuesday morning. For obvious reasons, they usually only share video of Doug Pederson’s postgame locker room speeches following Eagles wins. But the Eagles decided to share Pederson’s speech following the Eagles’ playoff loss to the New Orleans Saints. And when you watch it, you can understand why.

So, hey, when we set out on this journey this season, one of the things we kept talking about is no regrets, right? No regrets. We leave everything on the field. And that’s what you did. The whole season. You left everything you had out on the field. So for that, my hat’s off to every one of you. Every one of you. The way you guys hung together through adversity ... and we’ve had plenty of it this season. Plenty of it. The way you guys showed up every week. And practiced. And loved each other. That’s what great teams do. OK? And we will be better for this, I promise you. I promise you. And it sucks now. And it hurts right now. Because it’s final, right? It’s final. And that’s the part that kind of hurts the most, because, you know, that’s it ... for this year. But listen, I love every one of you men. The way you guys fought, battled. Giving yourself a chance. That’s what families do. That’s what brothers do. I’m proud of you guys.

Man. You can see in Pederson’s teary eyes that these aren’t just empty words. There’s genuine emotion behind him being proud of this team’s effort.

Malcolm Jenkins added to this sentiment:

We won’t focus on the results, we just focus on the process. We did everything that we could to give ourselves a chance. I wouldn’t change s*** about this team. We can go out there and compete with anybody. No matter what we got going on. And for that, man, I’m telling you I’m proud of y’all. I love every single one of y’all. At the end of the day, man, we didn’t get it done. But you keep your head high man because we go out and compete. This whole year, everything we’ve done had been special. And we have fun every time we step on the field. That’s all you could ask for. When it come to us, man, keep your head high. This mean, we gonna fight. We family. It started on family, we gonna finish on family. Family on three. One, two, three, FAMILY!

This is the right message to set following season.

Yeah, they fell short. And they should allow that pain to bother them for a bit and use it as a reminder that they need to be even better next year.

But this group should ultimately feel proud of what they accomplished after fighting back from 4-6. They proved the Super Bowl win wasn’t just a total fluke. They proved they’ve got a lot of heart.

They’ve earned the right to have self-confidence that they can hopefully build on in 2019.