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Some people might think that, since the Eagles won’t be playing in the NFL wild-card round this weekend, their fans won’t pay much attention to any of the games.
Some people don’t understand Eagles fans.
It’s not just that the outcomes of the three NFC contests will determine who the Eagles will face in the divisional round. It’s that there is one game that will command the attention of anyone who has followed or cheered for the Eagles for any length of time over the last, say, 60 years.
Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, 8:15 p.m. Monday. The Dallas Cowboys versus Tom Brady and the Buccaneers.
Like Apollo Creed said, it sounds like a damn monster movie. This is Freddy Krueger versus Jason Voorhees in a schlocky movie. This is two Real Housewives on Bravo, swinging purses and clawing at each other with their fake fingernails. This is Jerry Jones’ Botoxed face versus Brady’s TB12′d body. This is the franchise that Eagles fans hate most going against the player whom Eagles fans hate/respect/fear most. There’s no bad outcome here, really. It’s schadenfreude all the way down. The enemy of my enemy is the guy who got his butt kicked by Nick Foles.
You, to an Eagles fan: Who do you want to lose more: the Cowboys or Brady?
Eagles fan: Yes.
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Now, there are (potentially) tangible ramifications for the Eagles out of this game. Sure, if the seventh-seeded Seahawks beat the second-seeded 49ers on Saturday (remote at best) and/or the sixth-seeded Giants beat the third-seeded Vikings on Sunday (possible), then neither Dallas nor Tampa would have to visit Lincoln Financial Field until the NFC championship game, if one of them even makes it that far. But if the 49ers and Vikings hold serve at home, then either the Cowboys or Bucs would have to come here next week, and hell or fun or some combination of the two would follow them.
Time to get down to it, then: If you’re an Eagles fan, which of these antagonists should you root for? It’s a tough question to answer, I’m sure. Every fan carries his or her own baggage. Maybe your annoying next-door neighbor is a fair-weather Cowboys fan. (Is there another kind of Cowboys fan?) Maybe you traveled to Jacksonville for Super Bowl XXXIX and still can’t get over that Brady (and Andy Reid’s Beaky Buzzard approach to the game’s closing minutes) ruined your trip. To make the choice easier, let’s look at the three overriding factors worth weighing here.
The present
A pragmatic Eagles fan is likely asking a simple question: All things being equal, which team would my team have the best chance to beat? When you measure Cowboys-Bucs by that standard, it becomes pretty clear who the Eagles’ preferred opponent should be.
Though they were a weaker team this season on the road than they were at home — 8-1 at AT&T Stadium, 4-4 everywhere else — the Cowboys would present a much stiffer challenge. They have their weaknesses, of course: Dak Prescott led the NFL in interceptions (15) and interception percentage (3.8), and the Cowboys tend to fall short of whatever expectations the NFL’s cognoscenti have established for them. But they’ve already beaten the Eagles this season, and among Prescott, CeeDee Lamb, and their running game, they have enough talent and balance to keep Jonathan Gannon’s defense on its heels.
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The Buccaneers are a different case. They went 8-9 to win the NFC South, which was the league’s worst division. On defense, they were 22nd against the run, which would work to the Eagles’ advantage … assuming Nick Sirianni and Shane Steichen actually call a few running plays. On offense, the Bucs ranked 32nd, dead last, in yards per rush attempt. Brady is 45 and, for most of the season, looked it: His 6.4 yards per pass attempt was tied for the third-worst in the NFL.
A team with a quarterback who is five years away from AARP eligibility and oversees an anemic passing game? A team with a defense that struggles to stop the very thing that the Eagles do best? On paper, and probably in reality, there isn’t an Eagles fan anywhere who wouldn’t sign up for that matchup.
The past
The Eagles haven’t fared especially well in the playoffs against Dallas, Tampa, or Brady. They’re 1-2 against the Cowboys, though that one was the franchise’s biggest non-Super Bowl victory of the Super Bowl era: the 1980-81 NFC championship game. But then, most Baby Boomer and Gen X fans around here probably still feel some residual anger and resentment from the Cowboys’ dominance of the Eagles during the 1960s, the 1970s, and the early 1990s.
The Bucs have won three of their five postseason matchups against the Eagles — one of which, the ‘02-03 NFC championship game, stands as the most disheartening loss in Philadelphia football history. And Brady has beaten the Eagles twice in three playoff games, including last year’s 31-15 romp in the wild-card round. As satisfying as it would be to people around here for the Eagles to beat the Cowboys, there’s probably a stronger “sports revenge” case to be made against Brady and the Bucs.
» READ MORE: Meet the Eagles’ mystery man, their ‘Papa Bear’ head of security with a heart of gold
The insufferableness of it all
Take your pick. On one hand, you have a franchise that hasn’t won a Super Bowl in nearly three decades yet somehow remains “America’s Team,” whose owner built the nation’s most ostentatious sports venue in the country … in the middle of a suburban office park near a Walmart, as if the aliens in Independence Day stopped to buy breakfast cereal in bulk. On the other hand, you have a seven-time Super Bowl champ, the greatest quarterback of all time, who left his pregnant girlfriend for a supermodel, was involved in multiple on-field cheating scandals, reneged on his retirement, and divorced the supermodel.
My advice: Root for frogs and locusts.
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January 14, 2023 at 08:00PM
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It's Tom Brady vs. the Dallas Cowboys, and Eagles fans wonder: Can't they both lose? | Mike Sielski - The Philadelphia Inquirer
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