A bird pooped on my head last night.
A bird pooped on your head last night.
Collectively, we all got our heads pooped on by the Birds.
Let’s talk about the gooey white stain on our hats, briefly, and then zoom out to discuss all the other nonsense from a meaty Monday Night Football broadcast.
The city very quickly divided itself into two factions last night, akin to political parties:
Party 1: Bad playcall. You have to run the ball! What is Sirianni doing! THE ESPN METER WAS GREEN— GREEN MEANS GO FOR IT!
Party 2: Catch the ball, dammit!
Results are split 60-40 in favor of blaming Sirianni in our instant Twitter poll last night. I suspect there’s some anti-Nick bias after last season, while we’re still in the honeymoon phase with Barkley, who was otherwise excellent for the second game in a row.
Still, there’s a third party in this race, one which blames the defense for allowing the Falcons to fly 70 yards in one minute and five whole seconds without having a timeout.
But that party doesn’t really have a shot of winning, and does bizarre things with exotic animals, like dumping dead bears in Central Park and grilling alligators.
Let’s talk about the merits of Party 1’s platform.
All of the #advancedanalytics which all of us absolutely understand fully say run the ball to get the first down, and even if you don’t, go for it! on 4th down.
The irony is that running the ball is the conservative play, while going for it on fourth is the aggressive one. We all claim we want coaches to be aggressive, but what we really want is for them to be smart.
“Didn’t you take risk management in college?” John Kincade asked Andrew Salciunis on the 97.5 morning show today.
“I barely studied journalism,” Salciunas respond.
That sounds about right.
Here’s some Tweets that, let’s be honest, nobody truly understands:
As it turned out, it was an aggressive playcall that fooled the defense. Maybe out of a 100 scenarios, it proves to be the wrong call. But it really did "work" here.
Never mind this all happened on a night where we honored Nike Foles:
— #1 Kruk Stan (@laurlin24) September 16, 2024
Yes, it is, in fact, large, per published reports, and we all enjoy it so. But the real reason this shirt exists is because Doug Pederson called the most insane play on fourth down in the Super Bowl.
A little swing pass to Barkley feels less deranged. It just happened to not work.
Party 2's argument is pretty straightforward. Catch the ball, build the wall. Something like that.
Matt Ryan, his allegiances aside, didn't hate the call:
“That’s why you don’t throw.”
“It’s the perfect call.”
The conversation all day today for Eagles fans but with a few colorful words added for clarity and detail.
pic.twitter.com/LxMHPe7P0K
But I tend to side with the third-party candidate here. The Eagles were up six with under two minutes to play and the Falcons having no timeouts. They allowed Kirk Cousins to look like 10-years-ago Aaron Rodgers and waltz down the field, before BIG PLAY SLAY got filleted for the go-ahead score.
Drake London had Darius Slay doing the bachata, give that guy a map! pic.twitter.com/b14dJcZ8Qo
We can question the playcall, we can be mad at Barkley for dropping the ball, but can we please mostly blame the defense for being anti-competitive on the last drive? Even had the Eagles ran the ball on the third and then got stopped on fourth down, the Falcons would have had about a minute to do exactly what they did.
Jason Kelce
With the help of ESPN, the Brothers Kelce are almost in totality— this is the point at which they will block out at every hour of every day through some sort of communication medium. Scientists say the best locations to view the full eclipse are Philly, Kansas City, any country in which Taylor Swift has a show scheduled this calendar year, most Wawas, and the third seat from the end of the outdoor bar at The OD in Sea Isle City, New Jersey. That last one allows you to see all of the TV coverage and literally have the sun blocked for you by Jason Kelce. Super rare. It happens only once every Trilennia, which is a time period I think I made up.
Kelce was everywhere last night— parking lot, Xfinity, tunnel, field, broadcast booth, and probably at some point in the locker room. He had at least 3 costume changes, and performed all of his eras— partying drunk mode, local costume guy, suit guy, and he even previewed a new acting mode:
Jason Kelce tries to get in the Eagles locker room, Big Dom tells him he doesn't work there anymore but gives him a South Philly tuxedo pic.twitter.com/mVh82Vg5IB
Some thoughts:
I love this WWE-style backstage clip. For a while now, I’ve thought that sports need to double-down on their place in society as “entertainment.” Literal sports entertainment, as it were. We may have real emotions wrapped up in the games, and the media treats them like they are a Federal Reserve meeting, but at the end of the day, this is all entertainment.
And it’s one of the few forms of entertainment that still needs to be seen live. This is why sports investment and valuations have skyrocketed, because, along with Presidential Debates, they are the only events that capture attention, simultaneously, at-scale.
The leagues now embrace the ancillary stuff in an attempt to expand the live coverage window.
Things like player entrances (to the arenas), locker room access, live viewing simulation, cameras on the field, mic’d players, and more, have all added to the experience. Coaches and players may hate that stuff, but it’s that attention and, thus, ad money, that pays their salaries.
The next logical step in this is in cultivating faces and heels, a la the WWE.
For us and much of America, Kelce is a face. But he was almost certainly a heel to Falcons fans watching in the third quarter as the broadcast focused solely on the Birds, with Kelce openly rooting for them, and at one point breathing and grunting heavily into the mic while they performed his signature finishing move - The Tush Push - for a national audience. “Like a glove!” he said.
I thought for a second the camera would cut to him on the top rope while pouring Garage Beers™ all over himself after pummeling Joe Buck for no particular reason.
The point is, mainstream sports coverage is leaning into the entertainment aspect of everything. The Manningcast - which had the much less interesting Penn Charter grad (boo) Matt Ryan on as an ostensible alt-broadcast for the Atlanta viewing area - is an example of this. And so, too, is the analytics GREEN MEANS GO, RED MEANS DIE thing ESPN is using on fourth downs, as if everything is so binary.
you should punt Anyway, Kelce is perfect for this new world. He fulfilled his role brilliantly during pregame and the halftime show. He wasn’t particularly great in the booth, as he was overly polite and deferential to Buck and Aikman - the latter of which may very reasonably view Kelce as a threat to his job - and no one was exactly sure when he should leave to go find a tub of beers. They were acting out ESPN boardroom conversations live on air: Is this too much Kelce? Does Kelce know? Does ANYONE know? He’s delightful, this we know. And you’ll never hear me see anything bad about him. He’s a force of positive energy, and truly entertaining. At some point America may get tired of this, but it hasn’t happened yet.
“They’re getting their money’s worth on me today,” Kelce said during the halftime show. And that about sums it up.
National broadcasts typically do a good job of mixing the audio for the game in 5.1 surround sound.
The back speakers will often play ambient fan noise, so you can distinctly hear exactly one jackass shouting something inane. But last night, ESPN over-indexed on the stadium’s PA system, sending a constant hum of rap music - mostly from Patriots fan Meek Mill - into basements and dens across the nation.
I felt like I was in the club. Not da club, just a club, because there wasn’t nearly enough 50 Cent. And it wasn’t a particularly good club.
Please, for the love of God, just add in ambient crowd noise and call it a day. We don’t need the unnecessary musical interludes between every play pumped into our homes.
Perhaps in contrast to my earlier take about sports as entertainment, I think Troy Aikman is excellent.
Sure, he’s about as interesting as the seemingly identical peck-hugging dress shirts he and Buck were wearing last night, but he’s really good as an analyst, and has been for a long time.
He is the antidote to the Romo-Kelce-and-maybe-even-Brady trend of plopping raw talent into the booth. Brady may get there, for sure. But it was clear last night how seasoned and polished Aikman is compared to someone like Kelce. And he’s better than Collinsworth, Brady, Romo, and Herbstreit (better at college) among leading network analysts.
The Eagles ran two near-redzone pass plays to Britain Covey. That was precisely two too many near-redzone pass plays to Britain Covey.
when in the red zone, make sure to throw a perimeter screen for Britain Covey
For some reason#Eagles pic.twitter.com/LCW86SHP9z
I wrote this in this in our pre-game picks post in which I correctly predicted the Falcons’ random ass 22 points:
There are two types of teams in the NFC East: Perpetual underachieving laughing stocks, and the Eagles. The Cowboys, almost as predictable as the patterns of our celestial buddy, the Sun, fell flat on their face yesterday after their Week 1 #hype exceeded even Skip Bayless levels of absurdity. The Eagles, meanwhile, will maddeningly, and ploddingly (word?), grind their way to another two-score win with a mix of dinks, dunks and tush pushes against a boring Falcons team.
Loss aside, that mostly describes the Sirianni-led Birds. Barkley stands out for providing some excitement. But otherwise, for three years now I have felt like the Eagles just materialize points.
They score. They often win (or at least the used to). And they eat up the clock. But it’s rarely thrilling.
When they get W’s, they feel inevitable. They just rumble down the field and eat up yards. Like Pacman gobbling up those little goobers, they rarely take the most efficient route, but they get all of them eventually, and next thing you know the game is over. None of it is ever that fun.
And Hurts' pre-game Three Musketeers speech was as electric as flipping a switch on a surge protector that doesn’t give you a satisfying click or a red light to let you know that it’s on:
BRB RUNNING THROUGH A BRICK WALL 🧱 🏃♀️ @JalenHurts | #FlyEaglesFly pic.twitter.com/1ejZlBCgyK
JALEN HURTS WITH AN ELECTRIC PRE-GAME HYPE SPEECH IN THE TEAM HUDDLEpic.twitter.com/vfZII52TZi
Everyone had seen the tailgate alligator video by last night. Except my wife, who was alarmed upon learning what Eagles fans were serving up in the parking lots.
“They are going to get hammered by all the animal activists!” said the woman who takes her steak “still mooing” at restaurants.
She noted that some animals are just off-limits, and that this was akin to grilling a dolphin. You just don’t do it!
Thankfully, the Eagles don’t play Miami this year. Though the Jaguars come to town in November, and now I’m concerned.
For the love of God, can we please keep Bill Belichik and Matt Patricia off the Eagles’ sideline forever? Manningcast is fine though:
Belichick to Eli: "I got three dartboards, two of you and one of Foles." 😭 pic.twitter.com/h1IE4wemjM
I actually kind of like Arthur Blank even though he always looks ridiculous— this is a well-earned old-timey theater clap right here:
After being roasted all first half by Bill Belichick on the ManningCast, Atlanta Falcons Arthur Blank gets the last laugh! Listen to the old dope celebrating the Philadelphia Eagles shameful, epic collapse.🤣🤣
Shit-ass end game on offense and defense by the Eagles. pic.twitter.com/SIxx1tDOpk
BIG PLAY SLAY
I haven’t seen an Eagles d-back get cooked that bad since someone left Byron Maxwell in the toaster too long.
Cool cool.
Saints next week.
