What The Win Over Dallas Could Mean For The Eagles Season

Coming from a bye, fresh off an encouraging win against the Redskins, and at home against a Dallas team that has had their own share of late game issues this year, we could have always fancied the Eagles to be a dangerous team on Sunday night. What we actually ended up watching was not just a dangerous team, but a huge outburst of talent which was long over due from a squad that on the eve of Halloween proved it could be a nightmare for opposing coaches.

Simply put, the Eagles outran, outplayed, and, perhaps the sweetest of all, out-coached the Dallas Cowboys.

The question is, what do we make of this result? After a game that left Andy Reid’s success rate after byes looking more like the Undertaker’s record at Wrestlemania the Eagles sit at 3-4. Philly does not possess the most glamorous of records, this is true, but having just beaten the Cowboys, with the Redskins at the front end of what looks to be a spiraling descent, and with the Giants looking as unimpressive as they did against the winless Dolphins, the outlook for the Eagles future is not looking too bad at the moment.

As it stands now, Philadelphia is two games behind the “start hot-finish cold” Giants. In a league like the NFL where there are no easy wins, a 2-game margin is usually a big deal. And it’s not too long ago, when the team was 1-4, that people were discussing how much of a “best case scenario” type of luck the Eagles would need just to make it to the playoffs, and at the time, even those sort of talks seemed futile, but that was because of who the Eagles were.

A couple of weeks ago the Eagles simply looked like a bad mix of players, a group of guys who, despite their abundance of exceptional talent, too often seemed like square pegs in round holes. So yes, that team, those Eagles, made talking about a big run to the playoffs seem like a pipe dream, but the team we saw on Sunday is not that team.

The team we saw on Sunday is a team that had 80 rushing yards in the first quarter against a team that only allowed an average of 69 rushing yards per game.It was a team whose excellent pass rush now no longer had to come at the expense of their linebackers, a team with its tight end finally making a difference, a team with it’s biggest signing no longer looking like a fish out of water, and a team that had it’s quarterback gun slinging over the middle as if he was going through target practice. On Sunday, the Eagles quite simply looked like an elite team.

Now of course, it is not customary to “overreact” based on one game, and all if this is not to say that the Eagles are going to crush all opposition from now on, but this situation is just far too unique to not think about the type of turnaround Philadelphia can make in its season. It’s not as if the Eagles have played out of their depth for the past two games, rather, they look like what we expected from them at the beginning of the season. Sure the Cowboys didn’t have the greatest of games on Sunday but firstly, it takes a great team to make an opponent look that way, and secondly this is what the Eagles should be capable of.

We expected this team to create turnovers and to be explosive on offense, and now that this team is finally here it’s okay to feel that they should make a big run. because they have the talent to do so, and there are matchups in each game to take advantage of. The one problem that the Eagles had before was not just that they weren’t playing well, but also that they weren’t playing right. Judging by the evidence of Sunday night, it looks as if you can toss the latter out the window because it looks like Andy Reid has figured just exactly what works best for his guys, and that knowledge is simply invaluable.

Rarely do you want to play a desperate team, and even worse is a desperate team that is actually good. Even worse than that though is a desperate team that has as much talent as Philly does, and that is just kicking into gear with every incentive to not slow down. In the upcoming weeks, Chicago, Arizona, New York, New England, Seattle, and Miami will all know what it feels like to play that kind of team. If the Eagles stay hungry (a big IF), and continue to step out on the field with that same “we’re going to win this game” mentality, an attitude which their talent dictates they can have, then they should be more than able to finish the season looking more like Superbowl contenders than a team that started out 1-4.