One of the prevailing narratives in the NFL community is that the Eagles haven’t been tested, haven’t beaten anyone, haven’t shown any mettle, etc. Some kind of fugazi take along those lines. Yet when you look at the NFC, there are four other teams with at least six wins and the Eagles have dispatched two of them. They have wins against Minnesota and Dallas and will play New York twice. The South is a dumpster fire and Seattle is not on the schedule.

The typical response is something along the lines of “you can only play who is in front of you,” and that’s certainly true. More importantly, there are a lot of shitty teams in the NFL this season, and that’s skewing things disproportionately in a way we did not expect. Nobody saw Geno Smith outperforming Tom Brady and Aaron Rodgers this year.

If you go through the remaining Eagles schedule, the thing that stands out to me is that they’re playing against some utterly average quarterbacks:

  • Taylor Heinicke
  • Sam Ehlinger
  • not MVP Aaron Rodgers
  • Ryan Tannehill
  • Daniel Jones
  • Justin Fields
  • Dak Prescott
  • whomever is in there for NOLA
  • Daniel Jones

You look at that and think it’s going to be an easy path to 10-0, and that you’re not going to face the likes of Josh Allen or Patrick Mahomes or Tua Tagovailoa.

But according to our friends at Sports Betting Dime, the Eagles’ only have the 10th easiest second half schedule, whereas I think most of us thought that ranking would be top five or top three:

The Eagles are tied for the 10th-easiest 2nd half SOS. Their average opponent in the first half was a 7.2-win team, but does jump to an 8.3-win team in the second half.

This largely looks to be predicated on three remaining games against the surprising Giants and a Cowboys team with a healthy Dak Prescott. Tennessee also has five wins and the SBD formula spits them out with the same 2nd half SOS as the Birds:

For some context here, SBD and other data models had the Eagles coming into 2022 with the easiest schedule on paper. The thought was that the NFC East would be extremely shitty, but it actually is not, and so that’s resulted in the SOS shift. As the season has played out, the Eagles and Giants both moved closer to the middle of the pack despite starting at the very top end of the scale.

Bottom line is this –

With two games against Dallas (one vs. Cooper Rush, one vs. Dak), two against New York, and wins over the Vikings and Titans, they’ll have a resume that includes (possibly multiple) victories over the next three best NFC teams, plus an AFC division leader that likely ends up in the postseason. That’s not bad at all, and should help defeat the thought that the Eagles will have played and beat nobody.