By Max Harper
It’s easy to get caught up in the mania about the Eagles, who have had an active offseason, signing studs like Haason Reddick and reworking the deal with Fletcher Cox.
And yes they shook up the draft the other day with a trade that still left them with two first-round picks in the April 28 draft.
For some balance, here’s what The Athletic’s Sheil Kapadia thinks:
I think the Eagles are stuck in the NFL’s middle tier.
Lurie and Roseman have both mentioned recently that they’ve made the playoffs in four of the past five seasons, and that’s true.
But we can also look at their performance since winning the Super Bowl through a different lens.
Over the past four seasons, the Eagles are 31-33-1. Their winning percentage (.485) during that span ranks 19th — just ahead of the Miami Dolphins and just behind the Cleveland Browns. The advanced stats paint a similar picture. The Eagles have a +25 point differential in their past 65 games. That ranks 18th. They are 17th during that span in Expected Points Added (EPA).
According to Football Outsiders’ DVOA metric, the Eagles have finished 15th, 28th, 11th and 15th over the past four seasons.
It’s their first four-year stretch for the franchise without a top-10 DVOA finish since 1984 to 1987. In other words, this is a period of mediocrity the likes of which the Eagles have not seen since Lurie bought the franchise in 1994.
