Did the regular season lie to us?
The Eagles finished with the same record as the Vikings so why does it feel like the Vikings weren't close to Philly?
By Matthew Coller
Over the last week the Philadelphia Eagles have danced in the shower of praises that come along with winning the Super Bowl. They proved all the doubters/haters wrong and created the new model for team building and all that stuff. They got their legendary moment from the parade when GM Howie Roseman got hit with a beer can and they had at least one star player declare that they’re going to be a dynasty. Typical championship winner stuff.
It doesn’t bother me much that the “Eagles model” was just having a lot of good players at the same positions as the Purple People Eaters or Steel Curtain defense. It’s not that big of a deal that the Grand Poobah of Drafting Roseman also picked guys like Jalen Reagor, Andre Dillard and Derek Barnett just a few years ago and then hit a sudden hot streak that was bolstered by tanking one season for DeVonta Smith and ignoring Jalen Carter’s street racing.
I’m OK with the fact that the Giants dropped Saquon Barkley in Philly’s lap and the Titans handed them AJ Brown. It’s cool that the Eagles didn’t have to face any of the top four teams in the AFC in point differential or the No. 1 team in the NFC in point differential in order to raise their banner. Flags fly forever, apologize to nobody.
But one thing that I have struggled with in the aftermath of the Eagles winning the Super Bowl is that there isn’t a lot of evidence in Philly’s regular season performance that they should have blown everybody else out of the water in the playoffs. They ranked seventh in scoring and second in points allowed, outscoring opponents by 160 points. That’s a pretty far cry from the ‘85 Bears, who finished with a +258 differential. Not that +160 is bad but it ranks 24th out of 59 Super Bowl winners. When you consider that they had an extra game or multiple extra games over most past winners, it doesn’t really stand out. That’s not to even mention that Pro-Football Reference ranked Philly as having the second easiest schedule in the NFC.
In fact, NFL.com’s power rankings before the playoffs only had them as the fifth best team in the league.
When we look at the Eagles team strength from a more analytical perspective, they are clustered with some of the best teams in the NFL but they aren’t running off the charts in a way that would suggest they would absolutely demolish teams in the NFC Championship game and Super Bowl.
This from rbsd.com shows team tiers in terms of Expected Points Added:
As you might notice, the Packers are right next to them and they clobbered Green Bay in the Wild Card round. Oddly enough, the team that gave them the best run for their money was in the same cluster as three other teams that missed the playoffs. Huh.
Certainly health played a major role. The Eagles had basically their entire starting lineup from Day 1 of the season. Young players getting stronger as the season went along might be part of the explanation.
Maybe if they had played the Lions and Ravens, things would have played out differently. When they played Baltimore in the regular season, the Eagles only won by five points and were outgained in yardage.
Beyond the points about their path to The Big Game, I can’t shake the idea that the 2024 regular season did not tell us the truth about the strength of a lot of teams that made the playoffs. The Lions and Chiefs won 15 games, the Vikings won 14 and the Bills won 13, yet each of these clubs ultimately paled in comparison to the Eagles.
There are a couple of theories about how this happened. One of them being that there were a lot of bad teams in the NFL this year. Ten teams won five games or fewer. That’s one-third of the league that was basically incompetent or not trying. That is an unusual number. In the previous three seasons combined (2021-2023), there were only 15 total teams that won five or fewer games.
The Vikings, Lions and Packers took their free wins from the bumbling AFC South, going 12-0 combined. Buffalo had two wins against playoff teams all year. The Chiefs had the 10th worst point differential of any team to make the Super Bowl, yet they still won 15 games because bad teams like the Falcons, Raiders (x2) and Panthers couldn’t close them out.
The fairly good teams took full advantage of the lost and hopeless franchises in ways that we may not have seen in previous years because of the sheer volume of lostness and hopelessness.
The result of these teams rarely matching up against good competition was that the good regular season teams did not have their fatal flaws exposed very often. Consider that the Vikings were missing their superstar left tackle Christian Darrisaw but following his injury against the Rams, the only pass rushers they faced that finished in the top 25 in pressures were Josh Hines-Allen and Trevon Walker from Jacksonville and Za’Darius Smith in Detroit. The O-line and Sam Darnold struggled with both teams. When they attempted to slow L.A.’s Jared Verse, he put together one of the most impressive games in terms of pressure in the playoffs on record.
We can look around the postseason and say the same thing for nearly everyone else who came apart. The Chargers leaned heavily on the run but couldn’t compete when they needed to come from behind. The Texans lost two of their top three receivers and struggled with blitzes and CJ Stroud took a bunch of sacks and QB hits in big spots against KC. The Commanders couldn’t stop the run all year and then had an injury on the interior against Philly. And the Chiefs got away with washed up receivers/TE and playing a guard at left tackle until they did not get away with it in the Super Bowl.
The Eagles did not have a clear weakness to exploit. Even if you tried to make their weakness the fact that they didn’t have big passing statistics, QB Jalen Hurts was still a top five passer in QB rating and top three when he had a clean pocket (which was all the time).
Philly also had multiple cheat codes. They had two parts of their game that they did way better than everyone else. The first is obvious: They rushed for over 3,000 yards behind Barkley and converted every short-yardage situation with Hurts. You might think that the other is the Eagles’ pass rush but on paper it was actually another element of their defense: Coverage. PFF gave the Eagles a 92.9 coverage grade for the regular season, whereas the next best team was 84.8.
They still ranked No. 2 in pass rush grade and both elements of the defense played off each other but it can’t be ignored that the other teams in the playoffs lacked one absolutely phenomenal part of their team (aside from QBs) that rose way above the rest of the league. Detroit and Baltimore had the best cases for cheat codes. The Lions had their offensive line but their entire defense got injured and they gave up 45 to the Commanders. The Ravens had their run game and Lamar Jackson but they were missing their top receiver and literally fumbled away their chances in Buffalo.
The Vikings receivers were their best unit, ranking 4th in PFF grade. Great, yet not exactly “cheat code” status. Nothing else came close to running away from the NFL outside of turnovers and sacks, each of which can be inconsistent.
Back to the original point: Did the regular season tell dirty, filthy lies about what was to come in the playoffs? Did it badly mislead us about which teams were actually worthy of etching their names on Lombardi’s trophy? Was there really only one super team the entire time and we just got caught up in the NFL’s mirage of parity because of bad teams and one-score wins?
In hindsight it’s easy to see that we should have looked past how Philly’s numbers matched up vs. everyone else and focused on the player-for-player aspect. Without the benefit of knowing the results, yeah, the regular season was kinda full of it.
What are we supposed to do with that information, exactly?
We can start by suggesting that the Vikings acknowledge that there will be fewer teams that are complete calamities and that it’s unlikely they will be playing the worst division in the NFL next year (they play the AFC North and NFC East), so the path to double-digit wins is going to be harder.
It should sharpen our view of the bar to reach the Super Bowl. Having an area of the team that is well below average won’t cut it. The Vikings’ pass blocking overall was mid-pack but they played well below that in the final six weeks of the season and their run game graded 20th. They were also only scored 16th best in coverage and 25th in pass rush (which can be explained by PFF rewarding one-on-one wins within the front for a lot more than free-rushing blitzes).
How are they going to get there? Are there enough free agents available that the Vikings can build a roster without a major weakness and with a cheat code? Is this still going to be a multi-year work in progress rather than a team we should expect to repeat their 2024 performance?
I would be very curious about the Vikings interpretation of their 14-win season with a flawed team as it pertains to the quarterback position. Does the fact that the league had so many bad teams and pumped up the good teams’ records mean that it also made Darnold look disproportionately good versus what he would have done in a season with a normal distribution? Or does that mean JJ McCarthy’s road is likely going to be so much harder than 2024 Darnold that it’s risky to roll him out there with no previous experience? (The early insider reports on their mentality here are conflicting to say the least).
The other part that has to be factored is that things have to fall into place, sometimes in ways you never imagined. Think of the sheer number of moves the Eagles made that should have never happened. Jalen Hurts shouldn’t have been a second round pick. Jalen Carter shouldn’t have gone 9th overall. The Titans shouldn’t have traded AJ Brown. The Giants shouldn’t have franchise tagged Barkley two years ago. The league shouldn’t have let Cooper DeJean fall. The number of QBs in the first round last year opened the door for Quinyon Mitchell to land in Philly and so on.
We always think about luck in terms of fumble bounces and one-score games in the NFL and rarely in terms of roster construction but it’s pretty clear that the Vikings are going to need some luck in order to build a squad that can compete with Philly. Whether it’s free agents hitting career highs like we saw from Jonathan Greenard and Andrew Van Ginkel last year or mid/late-round draft picks emerging as legitimate stars as Stefon Diggs and Adam Thielen once did, some unexpectedly good things need to happen.
And then there’s the matter of the cookie crumbling the right way when the playoffs come around. The Vikings landed the absolute worst matchup that they possibly could have had against Los Angeles. The Rams coaching and roster built perfectly to cause problems for the Vikings. Had Sam Darnold failed to lead a game-winning drive against either the Cardinals or Seahawks and the Vikings ended up playing the Tampa Bay Bucs in Round 1 after sitting starters for a week, then maybe things would have been different in the playoffs.
The webs of the NFL are so tangled that it’s nearly impossible to figure out the things that matter most and the models that give the team the best chance to win. What we can say is that 2024 was a bizarre season that may have pumped up regular season records to points where teams appeared historically good but maybe instead were just… pretty good.
Of course, when the chips were down, the most complete team won. That’s usually how it goes anyway. Adjust accordingly.
Eagles’ roster luck has been insane. I couldn’t believe it when teams let Carter fall to them. They also had an international pathway player turn into the best player at his position in Jordan Mailata, which is roughly equivalent to Moritz Bohringer having turned into the next Randy Moss. I don’t know exactly how much stock to put into PFF grades, but one thing that stuck out to me when looking at teams going into the playoffs was how much better they graded out than the Vikings. Don’t have it in front of me, but I think most of the team graded out as top 32 players at their position, and a good chunk of guys were top 10.
Ted Lasso’s “ties and no playoffs; why do you even do this?” was hilarious. But, there is a valid point behind soccer’s approach.
Playoffs are fun (well, at least for some franchises) and they are objective results. But single-elimination tournaments, especially in a sport with so few scoring plays, are unreliable data. The Eagles had the same DL last year—if not a better one, with 2023 Reddick being much better than 2024 Huff—and they got summarily bounced by a mediocre Tampa team. One can and should note the better secondary this year, but the rookie corners weren’t the ones throwing Thuney into his qb.
We know the Eagles played really well in the 2024 playoffs, but that doesn’t tell us how good they actually are, or who would have won a playoffs with three rounds, each best of seven.