Philadelphia Eagles: Mercifully, the NFC East wasn’t swept again
The Philadelphia Eagles’ division is just so, so bad.
The NFC East is a bad, bad division that is not very good.
Through nine weeks, the division’s four teams – one of which still doesn’t have a name – have nine wins combined, one more than the Pittsburgh Steelers.
With an overall winning percentage of 27.27, again, easily the worst in football, when an NFC East team is on your favorite team’s schedule, you can pretty much pencil in a W without much fret.
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But, what happens when two NFC East teams play… each other? Surely every one of these games can’t end in a 0-0 tie, right? A tie? In football? Boy, that would be embarrassing.
Well, you get an increasingly rare weekend where the NFC East isn’t completely swept.
I know, this sounds like a silly statement, but through the first half of the 2020 NFL season, there has only been one week where NFC East teams won more than a single game combined (Week 7). For context, the division as a whole has as many two win weeks as they have zero win weeks (Week 3), a feat that no other division can say.
Yikes, that. is. brutal.
So, with the Philadelphia Eagles off for a well deserved and perfectly symmetrical Week 9 bye, it’s only natural to sit back and watch how the rest of the NFC East faired in a pair of contests, right? Would one of the teams somehow put it all together, look fantastic, and give the Eagles’ 1.5 game lead a run for their money?
Lol, no.
It all started in Landover, Maryland, Daniel Jones, and the New York Giants took the field against Kyle Allen, Terry McLaurin, and the rest of Ron Rivera‘s Washington squad.
The game was bad.
Allen suffered a leg injury at the end of the first and was replaced by first-round pick Dwayne Haskins 36-year-old Alex Smith, in only his second game back from a gruesome, probably-should-have-been-career-ending-injury. Washington ran the ball nine times for 37 yards, had two receivers go for over 100 yards, and committed five turnovers in an ugly 20-23 loss to the Giants.
Fun fact: Daniel Jones has five wins as a pro, and four of those wins come against Washington. The other win? Yeah, that came against the then-Jamis Winston-led Tampa Bay Buccaneers in Week 3 of the 2019 season.
And as for the Dallas Cowboys? Well, their loss wasn’t much fun to watch either… unless you’re from Philly.
Trotting out their third quarterback in as many weeks – this time the AFL’s all-time leading passer Garrett Gilbert – Mike McCarthy‘s squad was given the rare task of facing off against a 7-0 Pittsburgh Steelers squad looking to win eight-straight games to start the season for the first time in the franchise’s history.
David and Goliath, it was not. No, this was more like Rey Mysterio vs. Big Show at Backlash 2003.
For what it’s worth, Gilbert turned in (probably) the best performance of any non-Dak Prescott quarterback the Cowboys have trotted out this season – going 21-38 for 243 yards, a touchdown, and an interception – but between the Steelers’ lights-out offense and their even better defense, the chances of a Dallas win was bordering on zero.
Okay, technically, that isn’t fair. According to ESPN, the Cowboys had an 18.7 percent chance to win the game, which is not zero but still very, very low; the lowest of any team on the weekend, in fact.
While things did get a bit interesting when Ben Roethlisberger left the game with a left knee injury midway through the second quarter, he was only out for a single drive and retuned after the half to finish out the Cowboys 24-19.
And mercifully, the weekend was over.
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Fortunately for football fans the world over, the NFC East’s slate of games was over by 8 pm. While Week 9’s Sunday Night Football bout was far from one for the record books – objectively, it was a certified stinker – at least Philadelphia Eagles fans like yours truly could turn in early, maybe go for a walk, or better yet, stop at Wawa for a Gobbler knowing full well that the Philadelphia Eagles are heading to the playoffs this season – even if they’re going to get Mysterio’d themselves in the Wildcard round.