THE NEW PHILLY SPECIAL: A CHAMPION BUILT IN A CITY’S BACK-ALLEY IMAGE
The Eagles have created a new blueprint for an NFL culture rebuild, and the central figures are a head coach and general manager previously mocked by a tough crowd now won over by a Super Bowl berth
This wasn’t about a living, breathing Disney character quickly reverting to Mr. Irrelevant, grasping his right elbow as Bradley Cooper, Mike Trout and the Philadelphia loons drooled. This was about the linebacker who blew through a backup tight end to crush Brock Purdy and knock him out of the NFC championship game, snapping America’s fleeting cult hero back to reality.
The attacker’s name, for the previously uninitiated, is Haason Reddick, and he was signed last offseason without commotion by the Eagles’ general manager, Howie Roseman. Not long ago, Roseman was another villain in the city’s ongoing sports melodrama. Never mind that he’d helped produce the franchise’s only Super Bowl championship in 2018. In Philly, memories are shorter than sobriety cleanses. But now, just five years later, Reddick was continuing a season-long sacking onslaught that personified the body-bag, back-alley mentality created by Roseman and the head coach he hired from the intersection of Obscurity and Oblivion.
That would be chest-bumping, obscenity-dropping whirlwind Nick Sirianni, who was so nervous and disjointed in his introductory press conference two years ago that fans and media wanted to burn the cue card he was reading from. But now Sirianni was the toast of Philly, tears in his eyes, saluting the fans who once toasted him, way too overtaken by emotion to realize he had wickedly outcoached Kyle Shanahan.
“Obviously this is something you dream about as a kid. All these guys on our team have dreamt about this their entire lives, too,” said Sirianni, only 41 with bro-dude scruffle on his face. “Just to be able to do this together with a bunch of men who love each other, that are connected to each other, that will do anything for each other — it’s pretty sweet.”
The mobs roared in the stands, still bopping to their unofficial anthem “Dreams and Nightmares,” from rapper Meek Mill, one of their own. “You see this city and the passion they have for this team,” Sirianni said. “Look at this place. There’s no place like this in the NFL. It’s a hard-working city, a blue-collar city, and we think that’s the kind of team we have. I know people think it’s the kind of O-line and D-line we have, but it doesn’t stop with the O-line, D-line. We have tough guys everywhere.”
The Eagles are returning to the Super Bowl because Roseman, who once lost his organizational power to Chip Kelly, had the audacity to reconfigure a team in his smash-mouth vision. He had the foresight to draft Jalen Hurts, when no one was sure he could throw the football, and watched as a project was developed and turned loose as a badass, dual-threat quarterback. And he knew what he wanted defensively, maulers everywhere, the kind that would rile up a crowd as a full-scale brawl broke out in the final minutes of a 31-7 rout of the discombobulated, penalty-and-turnover-frazzled, quarterback-less San Francisco 49ers. Roseman never played football as a teen growing up in New Jersey, but he did write letters to executives of every NFL franchise. He has worked in the Eagles organization for 23 years and there were times when the owner, Jeffrey Lurie, wished he’d opted for a Wawa checkout line.
But there was Roseman in his tailored suit, hugging players on the sideline before finally greeting Sirianni with a long hug. Minutes later on the podium, they were standing side by side in the thundering din, two men who overcame civic mockery to take a position beside William Penn above the skyline. No one was prouder than Lurie, whose decision to fire Doug Pederson shortly after winning a Vince Lombardi Trophy was lampooned … until this season.
“We’ve got a very special group, led by Nick and Howie,” the owner said. “They’re quietly confident, always team-oriented and very humble. And they grind. They are grinders.”
We often hear landmark victories described as organizational triumphs. This one most certainly qualifies, from Lurie to Roseman to Sirianni to Hurts to Reddick to Miles Sanders and the beasts in the trenches who represent the stormy, beer-spilled bluster of a mean city built on community pride. You will hear much about Hurts these next two weeks, how he feeds off “hatred” and the career-long slights of doubters, including Nick Saban, who replaced him with Tua Tagovailoa in a national title game and now must marvel at who reached the Super Bowl first. But for now, focus on why the Hurts Experience is happening and why the defense is monstrous and why the Eagles have followed a 14-3 regular season with successive NFC playoff victories by a combined 69-14.
It’s a communal love-in, led by a coach whose Italian-American roots make him welcome at any red-sauce joint in South Philly. No one knew him when Roseman plucked him from the Indianapolis Colts, where he was offensive coordinator after a string of NFL assistant gigs. He played wide receiver at Mount Union College in Ohio, where he contributed to three national titles in Division III. He had no real pedigree in the league. Yet league insiders said he had a “beautiful mind,” and as soon as he started — after apologizing to the players for his press-conference snafu and promising to improve publicly — he bonded with Hurts. He never had played in the same offensive system for two straight seasons dating to his college years at Alabama and, after a high-profile transfer, at Oklahoma. He and his new coach would meet whenever and wherever possible, even with Sirianni’s wife and three children in tow.
Was Roseman crazy? He was cutting bait on Pederson, author of the “Philly Special” revelation in the Super Bowl LII, and Carson Wentz, recently an MVP candidate, and summoning a podunk coach to help another QB known more as an athlete than a finished product. Turns out the trio melded like beefsteak and melted cheese on a hoagie roll. With the help of game-breaking weapons DeVonta Smith and A.J. Brown, both courtesy of Roseman, Hurts thrived as a runner AND passer in Sirianni’s scheme. The Eagles dominate on the ground like few teams we’ve seen, but the run game doesn’t work if the quarterback can’t pass. Hurts is an elite QB now, maybe the league MVP if he didn’t injure a throwing shoulder that continues to bother him. He should remain a star for years in a city accustomed to two-way QBs in Donovan McNabb, Michael Vick and Randall Cunningham.
“Let’s take a moment to show love to the fans,” Hurts said on the podium. “I’m not going to make this about me. This city is a special city. They deserve everything that has been going on. We have one more.” Later, referring to dissenters in town who didn’t like why he was drafted 53rd in 2000 only 10 months after Wentz had been given a four-year, $128 million extension: “My first year here (people) probably didn't even want [me drafted] here. It was probably one of those things. But it always handles itself. It was a big surprise to many. My favorite (Bible) verse, I went through a lot of stuff in college and it kind of stuck with me, John 13:7: ‘You may not know now but later you'll understand.’ Hopefully people understand.” Oh, they do. Sometimes they’re just a little slow in Philadelphia, where it’s not always sunny.
Of course, time and Terry Bradshaw didn’t permit Roseman to speak at the trophy ceremony after Lurie, Sirianni, Hurts and an impromptu, multi-player stadium singalong of “Fly Eagles Fly.” But everyone loves Howie now, natch. As recently as November, before a game in Houston, a group of Eagles fans held a sign that said, “Howie You Are Forgiven!”
“I’m F’ing forgiven for your first F’ing Super Bowl?” Roseman fired back in a classic Philly moment, per ESPN. “F you!”
Not a doubter remains in the city, for now. “We’re on a mission. We’re on a roll. It starts with our faith and belief in each other. We’re fighting with each other, and at the end of the day, we’re on top,” Reddick said. Even when an Eagles punt struck a SkyCam wire, during a first-half hiccup when the 49ers still harbored hope, the fans believed. Once they saw Purdy go down and his unprepared replacement stink out the place — poor Josh Johnson, 36, has played for a record 14 NFL teams — they knew the 49ers couldn’t hang amid a hostile environment without luck or sufficient sideline guidance.
“We did it better than anyone in the NFC this season,” Sirianni said.
“I never knew how far we’d go, but I never said it couldn’t be done,” Hurts said. “We’ve got a chance to go out there and win it all. So we want to go prepare to do that. We’ve got new moments. New moments and new times.”
You might feel sorry for Shanahan, who has had to use four quarterbacks this season and summoned Christian McCaffrey for late wildcat duties after Johnson left with a concussion. Except he erred in not challenging a 29-yard catch when Smith clearly had lost control of the ball. He also erred in having Tyler Kroft, the second-string tight end, try to block Reddick, who led the NFL in sack score and forced fumbles. Of the failure to challenge the drop, he actually cited the Lincoln Financial Field video board for his reasoning. “The replay we saw didn’t definitively show that. I was going to throw one anyways just to hope, to take the chances, but they put one up on the scoreboard that didn’t have all the angles you guys saw, that looked like a catch,” Shanahan said.
The Niners have not won a Super Bowl in 28 years. The coach now will be blamed, unfairly, for blowing three big-game moments in a volatile career. Yet even with a healthy and able Purdy, or a healthy Joe Montana from a time machine, no one was beating the Eagles in Philadelphia on this Sunday.
And maybe not the Sunday after next in Arizona, either.
###
Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.