Every Eagles fan out there has already had about as many sighs of relief as they can handle this season, and it’s not even Week 3 yet. We all know the Eagles can’t go into every halftime trailing by more than a touchdown and win. It just can’t happen. Yet still, the birds have an average +10 point average margin of victory on the season, and a 2-0 record. Those things both sound like good indicators of where the season is going. But the amount of time the Eagles have spent trailing is not trend we’d like them to follow. So, how do we actually look ahead while taking all of the info in? FiveThirtyEight has an idea:

Philadelphia has an average points-per-game margin of +10 so far this season, which ties it for fifth-best in the NFL. If you look at how the Eagles’ games have developed, though, you’d never guess they’d have such a positive scoring margin. To measure this phenomenon, FiveThirtyEight contributor Chase Stuart has created a metric called Game Scripts, which attempts to more accurately measure how the totality of a game played out beyond the final score line. A team’s Game Script in a given game (or season) is its average point margin at any given moment.

FiveThirtyEight continues to say that the Eagles game script against the Colts was -4.8, which means “they trailed by nearly five points at any given moment in the game.” Usually, only about 17% of teams who have a game script that low win the game, and only 9% win when the team puts in a -7.1 performance, as the Eagles did against Jacksonville. According to all of that math, the Eagles are expected to have won only 0.26 of their first two games, but they won 2.0. It’s actually the biggest difference in expected wins vs. actual wins since 1978:

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Now, that graph above isn’t saying the ’81 Bengals won 12 games while only pulling in 0.30 game script wins all season, just through the first two games. A thousand different factors come into those first two games, and a thousand others will come into the next 14, but I think this team is probably a bit more ’81 Bengals than it is ’13 Texans.

Kyle: I think a lot of this has to do with Chip Kelly’s training program. It’s not good to keep falling behind, but even going back to last season, it’s obvious that the Eagles are better conditioned than just about any opponent. All those smoothies, up-tempo practices and sleep monitors, I think, may be the biggest reason for the Eagles’ success under Kelly. They. Just. Keep. Coming. Studies like this don’t factor in those intangibles. Still, leads are fun.