There wasn't much Super Bowl LIX taught us that we didn’t already know. Defense still wins championships, winning the turnover battle is key, and teams who use free agency wisely and only draft good college players end up with the best rosters.
Give the Philadelphia Eagles credit. The team general manager Howie Roseman reloaded in one offseason embodies all of the above, and then some. When the Eagles got on top of the Kansas City Chiefs early, they hardly gave the defending champions any room to breathe. A 24-0 halftime lead deficit became 34-0 late in the third quarter. History will remember it as a 40-22 win for the Birds, but it was a lot more lopsided than that.
Nope. Losing by multiple scores to this Eagles team is nothing out of the ordinary. Just look at the worst loss suffered by the Cincinnati Bengals this season for proof.
It's the offseason for every team now, but the Bengals have been looking back at their 2024 campaign for the last month. A 9-8 record featured seven losses by nearly every possible single-digit difference. They played in 11 one-score games and went 4-7. Their lone defeat by multiple scores was a 37-17 loss to the Eagles back in Week 8.
If you're gonna get blown out by one team all year, it may as well be the last team standing.
That loss didn't quite play out like the one K.C. just took. Cincinnati actually got out to an early 7-0 lead following a clinical opening touchdown drive by Joe Burrow and Co. Philly tied the score at 10 apiece right before halftime, and the Bengals' inability to pressure Jalen Hurts throughout the afternoon ended up being their downfall. Hurts played as clean of a game as his uniform was by the end of the fourth quarter with the Bengals sacking him zero times and only pressuring him four times.
The Eagles kept Hurts just as clean Sunday night, and the opposite was true for Patrick Mahomes. The Chiefs watched their QB go down six times as their offensive braintrust had no answers to the Eagles' four-man pass rush. Vic Fangio kept all his blitzes in his back pocket, not needing anything creative when his defensive line was blasting through the Chiefs' protection unit. An athletic secondary led by rookie Cooper DeJean only made things tougher for an embattled Mahomes, who looked just as flustered as he did four years ago against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in his first Super Bowl loss.
Parity is usually king in the NFL, but talent gaps can arise in any matchup. The Eagles proved to be the most talented team in the league by taking down a team many thought were inevitable. The Bengals shouldn't be too surprised considering what happened when they faced them a few months beforehand.
-1739894981-q80.webp "Maple Leafs’ Player Grades Through First 55 Games of 2024-25 Season")
-1721620756-q80.webp "What is high sticking in hockey?")
