If you grew up in the Philadelphia area youâd know that Sundays are sabbathian. Even the Lord our God will probably concede that. Sundays are for the Birds. It’s that simple, as are true Philadelphia Eagles fans. But before we get into what it means to be an fanatic about the Philly local 22 here’s a look at the NFL season finale between the Eagles and Chiefs in a winner-take-all Super Bowl 59.
The Basics: Chiefs vs Eagles
- What: Super Bowl 59
- Who: Chiefs (18-2,) vs Eagles (17-3)
- When: Sunday 6:30 p.m. ET
- Where: The Superdome, New Orleans, LA
- TV: FOX
- Betting: Chiefs -1.5, Total 48.5Â Money Line: Chiefs 110, Eagles +115
 It’s never been easy being a true born and bred Philadelphia Eagles fan. I should know, for I’m a cult member – true story. Of course the city of brotherly love was a fine place to grow up. If you were lucky enough to avoid staying at the Bellevue-Strafford Hotel in the summer of ’76 or lived on a street not named Osage Avenue in the mid ’80’s or avoided standing behind P.A. State Treasurer Bud Dwyer at his “farewell” press conference in January of ’87.  If you were fortuitous enough to steer clear of those near death experiences, your reward was just having to endure a life wrought with more misery and agony of many more football tragedies than you could possibly handle. But such is the simple life of an Eagles fan – out of the frying pan and into the Irving Fryar. Â
Silver Linings Playbook, starring Robert De Niro, Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence, is a flick that so brilliantly and shrewdly captured the psychology of Eagles nation. Based on the book by Oaklyn native and long time Eagles fan Mathew Quick, S.L.P.B. is full of the granular details that only a diehard Eagles fan would understand and is a must watch for any Birds fan that grew up in the Delaware Valley.
In one of the first scenes there’s a back and forth between Pat Sr, the father, played by Robert De Niro and Randy, an antagonistic character played by Beansy from the Sopranos.
 RANDY: DeSean Jackson. What happened to DeSean Jackson? Come on, tell me that one.
PAT SR: It’s insanity. He spikes the ball at the one yard line. The one-f%$#ing-yard line. I mean, get into the end zone, dummy. I mean, he celebrates before he’s even in!
RANDY: You know something? It’s nothing new. Your team does that all the time. They get close...and then they blow it. They got an inferiority complex.
PAT SR: Wait a minute, what are you talk about? What makes the Cowboys America’s Team?
RANDY: Because we are, we’re America’s Team.
 PAT SR: You should be ashamed of yourself. We’re in Philadelphia, what’s the matter with you? You’re a fucking traitor.
RANDY: What’s more American than a cowboy?
PAT SR: You know what’s more American?
RANDY:Â What?
PAT SR: Benjamin Franklin, that’s what’s more American.
RANDY: Benjamin Franklin?
PAT SR: Benjamin Franklin. The founder of our country, here in Philadelphia.
RANDY: You mean the guy with the…little glasses and the long scraggly hair?
PAT SR: What about the lightning with the kite? He stood in the storm with a kite.
RANDY: If he wasn’t on the hundred dollar bill, nobody…would even know who he is.
Family First And Foremost
The movie encapsulates the fact that first and foremost being a Birds fan is all about family . But to be a “made” Birds fan you have to have 100% kelly green blood and had to be born into it for only the true elements of Eagles’ fandom, and the pain that it carries with it, could be passed down from generation to generation through the verdant DNA codes of the ones that went before us.
PAT JR (played by Bradley Cooper): What, are you kidding me? Sundays? I love Sundays. I live for Sundays. The whole family’s together. Mom makes braciole, crabby snacks and homemades. Dad puts the jersey on. We’re all watching the game…”
That’s pretty much what it sounded like at my Grandmom’s house every Sunday during the fall in the 70’s and 80’s and most likely in some similar fashion, heard in almost every household within a hundred mile radius from ground zero.
From Doom And Gloom To Boom and Zoom
I’m also intimately familiar with the “getting close and blowing it” lifestyle that we’ve worn as a badge of honor. It was the underlying theme of our core principles until recently. Since the very first Super Bowl was played on January 15, 1967 it took the Eagles 18,648 days to win their first Super Bowl and since that day, February 4, 2018, its taken them just 2,562 days to reach their third title game since. Three Super Bowls in eight seasons? Where the bleep am I? If you answered Saquon country you nailed it, both literally and figuratively. He’s actually my neighbor unbeknownst to him but i figure its only a matter of time until we’re boys. Barkley is the biggest and baddest difference from the Super Bowl loss to the Chiefs two years ago. Hence the confidence that Eagles Nation has been been sporting for the last two weeks.
It’s a good time to rock the kelly green but while I don’t subscribe to the nonsense about today’s game being a legacy game, due to the fact that a lot of these guys have a lot of time left to change the narrative on what history will say about them after around 10;30 pm tonight. I’m just not into recency biasness or overaction to the moment and I think the ones that do it for a living just keep embarrassing themselves every time out. Chiefs head coach Andy Reid coached the Birds for 14 years and left Philly with a heavy label of a coach who couldn’t win the big one. Do people still say that about him? He’s more like the coach who can’t lose the big one these days. Pretty ironical huh?
As someone who always had access to the trough of the green Kool Aid, I also had the pleasure of getting a real good look at what Phillies’ Hall of Fame third baseman Mike Schmidt once said, “Only in Philadelphia can you experience the thrill of victory, and the agony of having to read about it the next day.”Â
It was true, even then, that Philly media, and by proxy, the fans cared about effort, emotion and affect almost as much as the outcome. Philly is a blue collar city and we want our players to reflect that same spirit.- relentlessness, loyalty, urgency, toughness and at times, anger. Indifference to failing is unacceptable around here. The same goes for failing without seething or at least some kind of distasteful emotion. As long as you show up in a timely fashion and prepared to play with your hair on fire you should be good. You’ll not only be accepted but embraced.Â
Santa Had It Coming
We take a lot of outside criticism over our handling of the North Pole’s prodigal son, but despite a pretty clean track record is it too much to ask a guy who works one day a year to show up as his best self? Hey, um, Krissy, we love ya bra but showing up at half time in the throws of a 2-12 season in a disheveled Santa Suit and scraggly off-white-more-like-gray-beard and so lubed up you made Dan Aykroid in Trading Places, eating raw salmon that he stole from his former company’s Christmas party while brandishing a Sig Sauer 9 millimeter with bad intentions, look buttoned up and well prepared for his annual toy-drop world tour. Yah, you’re getting pelted. But hey, in the immortal words of Henry Hill a la Ray Liotta in Goodfellas, “the way I see it, everyone takes a beating sometime.”Â
They say misery loves company and failing for so long became a common ground for strangers to bond, commiserate and heal. hence the advent of sports-talk radio in the early 90’s. When I was still just a fan back then it was a therapeutical outlet and when my career path ultimately landed behind one of those coveted microphones at 97.5 The Fanatic, with 50,000 watts behind it 13 years later, I became the therapist for my broken-hearted brethren.  It was the perfect job for me because I wasn’t just dealing with the academics of the healing process, like most therapists, who only understand what their patients are feeling on an academic level, most not knowing what the actual pain of the issues actually feel like. But I lived it. I felt it. I experienced the same angst and regret that Eagles Nation was feeling at various low points. These common subpar and often triggering events you can claim as your own and use them as a way to find shared ground with strangers in a bar or coffee shop or on social media.
Lest we forget?
- The Fog Bowl in 1988
- Tommy Hutton dropping the snap on a potential game-winning field goal in Dallas on a Monday night in 1997 3)
- John Sciarra doing the same against the Redskins back in 1981 on a potential game-winning 25 yard field goal attempt 4)
- There was the Christmas Eve collapse of 1978 in a Wildcard playoff game against the Atlanta Falcons. Eagles’ punter Mike Michel was thrust into kicking duties when Nick Mike-Mayer was hurt in week 12. Michel missed a critical extra point as well as the potential gam-winning 34 yard field goal with :13 seconds left as the Birds blew a 13-0 fourth quarter lead, losing to the Falcons 14-13
- Then of course, the ones we take to our graves – the Super Bowl 15 debacle that saw Birds’ quarterback Ron Jaworski complete more passes to Raiders’ linebacker Rod Martin than to any of his own receivers. Martin, who finished the game with three interceptions was amazingly snubbed by the MVP voters of that game, in favor of quarterback Jim Plunkett who torched the Birds for thee touchdowns in a 27-10 loss to Oakland once upon a time. I could go on but you get the idea.
The Passion
In a nutshell to be worthy and accepted into the Green culture you need to possess these three character traits:
- Loyalty
- An irrational and unmitigated hatred of the Dallas Cowboys.
- This one is what really embodies the spirit of Eagles Nation: Passion
Now hereâs the thing about passion. The word comes from the Latin pati: âto suffer.â Hmmmm. Sounds about right. Originally, the concept of passion was interwoven with suffering. You couldnât have one without the other.
The original meaning of passion points to an essential truth: when weâre passionate about something, it doesnât always mean itâs fun or pleasurable. It means we keep it in our lives because it matters deeply to us, not just because it makes us feel good or we feel like doing it some times.
When something is important enough to us, when we care enough about it, we will keep on doing it anyway. Some might call it a good old-fashioned unhealthy Sisyphus Complex. We donât mind suffering for it because it means something to us, and weâll make sacrifices and often times excuses in order to be able to do it. Thatâs why, even when we encounter struggles and setbacks, we wonât quit.
Or putting it another way:
Passion is the foundation of all great accomplishments, for better or for worse. It has created the world we live in. It has won wars. It has built empires. It has terrorized nations and designed the mini-computer you hold in your hand as you read this article. Passion stands up for what it believes in and it doesn’t discriminate. It elevates the bar and raises its voice to speak to throngs of people. It celebrates success and is devastated by failure. Passion unites us. It makes us want to put our arms around a total stranger and sing the words to Mr. Brightside.
Passion is our fundamental purpose for existing. If you go through life having never felt this strongly about something, no matter what it is, you might as well have never existed at all.
Feeling the debilitating angst and heightened nervousness for games like this one are a blessing. They are rights of passage for the very few who get to endure them while basking in the purity of the rarefied air that would make a hyperbaric chamber look more like the gas chamber.
As I stated earlier this isn’t a legacy game but more of a swing game. If the Chiefs win they make a little history by being the the first team to win three consecutive Super Bowls. It will also be Birds’ quarterback Jalen Hurts’ second Super Bowl loss in the last three seasons. Keep in mind this isn’t a legacy game in my opinion. Hurts is still in the embryonic stage of his career and has plenty of time to change the narrative should the Eagles lose today (see John Elway). But if Hurts leads the Birds to victory today he immediately puts himself in the pantheon of great performers. All he does is win. His last loss when starting and finishing a game was 133 days ago. His numbers over the last 13 games including playoffs are eye-popping. Check it out.
Jalen Hurts Last 13 Games Including Playoffs:
Record: 13-0
Comp Pct: 69.7
Total Td-Int: 33-1
Passer Rating: 113
As Bart Simpson would say, “That aint not bad.”
If the Birds play their game today and don’t flinch, the Mahomes magic ends today. Just remember to enjoy the moment. You green bloods deserve it like there’s no tomorrow, cuz when you get right down to it, there isn’t.
Prediction: Eagles 34, Chiefs 27
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