Welcome to Overreaction Season (also known as the first few weeks of the NFL calendar)!
One item you'll often see in the football media are speculations about a given team's playoff chances, given that they've started with. For example, we've already pointed out that 25% of the most recent teams that started 4-0 (or better) failed to even win a playoff game. Naturally this means that, in the context of recent history, teams that start 4-0 have a 75% chance of making the playoffs. Similarly, starting 0-4 is a virtual death knell; only one team (the 1992 Chargers) ever made the playoffs after starting so poorly.
Inspired by this incomparable research, I decided to do a little digging and chart out the Eagles' playoff prospects by the start they had. I only tracked the Jeff Lurie era (1994 to present) as one might reasonably consider this the modern era of Eagles history; the organizational philosophies have remained largely unchanged over that time frame. I tracked the Eagles' records after two, four, six and eight games, as well as the net points per game to gain context. We'll mostly be dealing with 2-0 starts, considering that this is where we find ourselves this season. Here are my observations:
This season will mark only the fifth time the Birds have started 2-0 in that 29 year stretch. The only other seasons that fit this description are 2004, 2012, 2014 and 2016.
Only one of those previous seasons resulted in an Eagles playoff berth (2004). We recognize that 2004 season as the finest of the Andy Reid era (quite a statement). Philly opened up 7-0 that season and of course, played in the Super Bowl. The other seasons? Not so much.
What happened to those other teams? In 2012, Philly managed back-to-back one point wins (17-16 over Cleveland and 24-23 over Baltimore). Spoiler alert: Philly got out as strong as 3-1 with another tight win (19-17 over the Giants), but three wins by a total of four points (sandwiched around an ugly 21 point loss to Arizona) simply reeked of fraud. In hindsight it should surprise no one that the Birds fell off a cliff from there, In 2014, Philly opened with a big rally to beat Jacksonville (fell behind 17-0, scored the game's final 34 points to win) then followed that up with a tough road win over a Colts team that ended up in the AFC Championship Game. The 2014 Eagles remain one of the more frustrating editions in my lifetime; they opened up 9-3 and in charge of the NFC East. They lost three of four down the stretch (again, the season really starts on Thanksgiving) and lost a Wild Card spot on tiebreakers; a 10-6 team staying home in January. In 2016 (the rookie year for both Carson Wentz and Doug Pederson) Philly blasted two weak teams (Cleveland and Chicago) by a total of 19 points in the first two games. Those wins were part of a 4-2 start that also included wins over previously undefeated Minnesota, and AFC runner up Pittsburgh. We all remember Philly sliding off substantially over the latter portion of the season to finish 7-9. This statement may get its own write-up down the road, but I've long taken the opinion that the 2016 Eagles were the best team to finish with a losing record in at least 30 years. There are multiple statistical analysis that back that point up, but simply consider that the '16 team placed 7th in Pro Football Reference's excellent SRS stat, and 4th in the now-famous DVOA metric. Those rankings normally would place a team on the fringes of Super Bowl contention. For what it's worth, the 2014 team that missed the playoffs finished 10th in SRS and 7th in DVOA.
What can we learn from this history about Philly's 2022 prospects? Of course, we hope that this year's team lands closest to the 2004 Eagles. That team looked great on paper, was great in real life and lived up to any reasonable expectations. The 2014 and 2016 teams were both playoff-caliber but fell short due to struggles in one score games (4-9 combined between both years) and in the all important post-Thanksgiving stretch run (4-7 combined). Time will tell for this team on those fronts. As already mentioned, the 2012 Eagles only looked good if you looked at their record. The games themselves were painful to watch, and the results quickly caught up, ultimately costing Andy his job. Philly's net +20 point differential through two games in 2022 is correlated much more strongly with 2004 (+25), 2014 (+20) and 2016 (+19) than the 2012 group, providing some meaningful hope that this team will be in the playoff chase come December.
BONUS: the most common two game record (by far) in this time period is 1-1 (as one might expect). This has been a remarkably friendly result for Philly, as they made the playoffs 14 times in those seasons, including the Super Bowl year.
This story will be updated after games 4, 6 and 8.
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