Dear Eagles...

Yesterday, the Eagles finished off their 2016 season with a win over the Dallas Cowboys in 2017. It was an enjoyable, if meaningless football game, and the Birds actually finished with a pair of nice division wins to end the season. Carson Wentz played well over all, and finished his rookie season on a positive note.

Now a little real-talk though. For the second straight season, the Eagles finished 7-9, and this was a third straight season out of the playoffs. The last time the Eagles won a playoff game was 2008 (the Bush Administration), appeared in the Super Bowl in 2004 (Also Bush era), and won a championship was 1960 (The Eisenhower Administration). None of that is good, and yet they generally get positive coverage in Philadelphia. Talk radio is dominated by fans who think the Eagles are on the verge of winning the title. Sports writers in town cover them as though they are an elite NFL franchise, and not something similar to the Cleveland Browns or San Diego Chargers. Again, the team has been out of the playoffs for three years, and hasn't won a playoff game in eight years.

So while I like the Eagles, they may want to stay out of PR messes like yesterday, when they kicked a reporter out of the press box for disagreeing with the Eagles PR staff. A few days earlier, he had written negative coverage about the Eagles' GM's moves this season, and suddenly he was kicked out of the box. This doesn't just seem stupid on their part, it seems excessively stupid. They aren't a team doing so well that they can afford to take negative coverage for things like this. The team isn't good. The product is borderline fair. Getting slammed for hitting the press seems to be a bad move.

I get it- some of these dopes used to pretend Chip Kelly knew something about football and Nick Foles could play at this level. That's on them though. The Eagles would be smart to not make fools of themselves on this matter, or matters like this, in the future.