Clik here to view.
PS
Last year: 10-6, NFC East champs, lost in Wild Card round
Acquisitions: Darren Sproles, Malcolm Jenkins, Mark Sanchez, Marcus Smith
Departures: DeSean Jackson, Michael Vick, Patrick Chung, Jason Avant
Vegas 2014 win total over/under: 9 wins
Verdict: OVER
Clik here to view.
NFLN
Five ways the Eagles knew DeSean Jackson was in a gang:
— He likes the hippity hop!
— Tattoos!
— Grew up near Compton and somehow knows someone who is in a gang!
— Riley Cooper always referred to him as one of “those people”. Sounds like gang code!
— Always asked for acai berries in his Chip Kelly personalized smoothies. Gangs love acai berries!
Clik here to view.
Fan forecast by Danger Guerrero:
First things first: It is super fun to have Chip Kelly as the coach of your favorite football team. I want to be very clear about that. He’s just the best. He talks trash about the combine and preseason depth charts, he opens training camp by blasting “Return of the Mack” over the loudspeakers, he does everything — everything — at a zillion miles an hour like someone up and made Calvin from Calvin & Hobbes a football coach and gave him a visor. I hope he never leaves, and if he does, I hope it’s to become mayor of Philadelphia. The public transportation system would be so intense. Hyperloops and shit.
But, with all of that shouted from the top of a mountain, I remain nervous. The past six months have been incredibly rough on Philadelphia fans. The Sixers went 0-February on their way to tanking so egregiously the NBA considered making an emergency rule change to punish them. The Phillies have been rotting in front of our eyes, and management shows no signs of having a plan to reverse the process. If not for Joel Embiid’s Twitter account, it would have been unbearable. (NOTE: I am told the Flyers had a decent year. I will have a full report on this once I figure out exactly what this “hoc-key” thing is that people seem to be clamoring about.) To say that there are high hopes for the Eagles is a little like saying the sun is kind of big and yellow and hot. We are not an especially patient bunch. Perhaps you’ve heard.
And that’s the problem. I’m so amped up for the team to run out of the tunnel on the first Sunday in September and start stacking up touchdowns like Lincoln Logs that part of me is waiting for the Great Cosmic Yoink to pull me back to Earth. Like, what if Nick Foles can’t repeat the success he had in his first full season as a starter? What if the defense continues to struggle and the Ferrari offense ends up stuck in the garage with a tarp over it for entire quarters at a time? What if a piano falls on Chip Kelly’s head while he’s walking from the parking lot to the stadium? It could happen. You don’t know.
Some of this is me being a worrier by nature. I’ll cop to that. But some of it is real. If they start 0-2 and one of LeSean McCoy’s knees finally figures out that the human body isn’t supposed to do thing likes this…
Clik here to view.RapGenius
… I honestly don’t know if I’ll be able to handle it. I might just shut down emotionally and spend every waking moment between that day and the end of the season passively watching cartoons with a bowl of cereal in my lap.
None of this is to say I’m not excited. I’m very excited. The Eagles are the most fun, most dynamic team in the league heading into the 2014-15 season, and national media writers are straight up gushing over them. They’ve got big strong dudes and crazy athletic dudes all over the field, and a coach who seems to wake up each morning with about a dozen new ideas about how to get all of them into the end zone as quickly as possible. There are even some non-Eagles fans pulling for them because of all of it (I see you, Twitterers), which, as a Philadelphia fan who has spent the better part of his life fact-checking people on the Snowballs at Santa story, is very weird. Here in August, about three weeks out from Week 1, things are kind of … well, great.
It’s terrifying.
