“They kept the wrong quarterback!” 

Here we go again with the Nick Foles stuff. As soon as he led the Bears to a comeback win on Sunday afternoon, you knew his Philadelphia supporters (like Kyle and Investor Mike) would crawl out of the woodwork to tell us how much Carson Wentz sucks and that the Birds should have traded him and kept Foles instead.

Here’s the thing:

They might not be wrong. Wentz has been a total train wreck in the 1.25 seasons following Foles’ departure. He stinks so bad that we’ve got people calling for Jalen Hurts in week three.

Nick obviously had a connection with this coaching staff and group of players that can’t be parsed and packaged into a nice analytical data set that allows us to make for a neatly-presented argument. Foles and Doug Pederson just had an “it” factor that can’t be described.

Maybe Nick’s post-Philadelphia struggles help explain that bond. He did, after all, lose his starting job in Jacksonville to Gardner Minshew. He couldn’t beat out Mitch Trubisky for the Chicago starting job this summer. Nick was awesome on Sunday, but the undisputable truth is that he has not lit the world on fire since leaving Philadelphia, which is why it seemed like we’d put the whole Foles vs. Wentz thing finally to bed and moved on to other, more relevant shouting matches.

The problem with the Foles vs. Wentz argument is that the Eagles were NEVER going to keep Nick over Carson, which is why the topic is not even worth talking about. They were never going to keep the older guy over the younger guy, because they thought they had a 26-year-old  franchise quarterback in the latter. With an age difference of four years, and a pre-injury MVP-level highlight reel on the resume, the Birds decided to extend Carson and allow Nick to get his deserved pay day in Jacksonville.

That’s it. You could pretty much end the story right there.

The lingering issue is that people simply cannot make peace with the fact that the Eagles were never going to keep Foles. They can’t move on. You’re arguing for something that had 0% chance of happening, which brings us now to the football equivalent of exhumation, only without the dead bodies. We’ve already put a bow on Nick’s legacy in Philadelphia. We need to appreciate his legendary playoff run, archive it, stuff it into the annals of Eagles history, and LEAVE IT FUCKING BE.

The problem with the “Folesian society” is that they feel this incessant need to re-litigate something that was never a discussion in the first place. It was always going to be Wentz over Foles, and no amount of stuffing the square peg into the round hole of hindsight is going to change that.

Unfortunately – and this is the worst part – the constant revisiting of a non-topic has an adverse affect on people who love Nick but moved on a long time ago. Because whenever the Foles supporters poke their heads out of the dirt, what happens is we then have to go back and constantly remind them that:

  • Nick underwhelmed in the 2017 Raiders game, with 1st place in the NFC on the line (the defense won this game)
  • he was only average in the Falcons’ divisional game (the defense also won this)
  • he was the definition of average in the 2018 Falcons and Bucs games to begin the season (1 TD, 1 INT, 54-82, 451 yards)
  • the defense won the Rams road game in December of 2018 (Eagles also ran the ball 30 times)
  • he threw three touchdowns and four interceptions* in the 2018 playoffs with QB ratings of 77.7 and 61.4 (of course, the Alshon Jeffery drop and interception were not his fault*)

 

People act like Nick’s Philadelphia run was flawless, but it was not. He was absolutely awesome in the NFC Championship Game and the Super Bowl, and he had that “big game” DNA that quarterbacks rarely have. It can’t be defined.

But his Philly track record was not spotless. He posted a few clunkers over his two seasons, and any typical front office is going to take into account the entire body of work a quarterback compiles while also considering his age and market value.

I hate having to do this, because I love Nick forever and don’t want to tarnish his legacy. You did this to us, Folesian Society. You are to blame for this absolute nonsense.

Therefore, I beg of you, please leave Nick Foles’ Philadelphia legend alone. Please stop mentioning his name every time Carson Wentz makes a mistake. They were always going to keep Wentz and let Nick leave for his deserved pay day. It doesn’t mean they made the correct decision, but the argument stopped being an argument more than a year ago. It was never really an argument to begin with.

Nick Foles is gone and he’s never coming back. It’s on you to accept this and move on.