One of the things that has widespread support among Crossing Broad staffers is the idea that we need a break from Philadelphia Eagles talk at some point during the offseason.

The Birds pay the bills in most media households and will always lead site traffic outside of a Phillies playoff run, so it would be naive to think you’d ignore the local football team entirely.

However, we’re now in week 2 of analyzing this Jalen Hurts press conference, you know, the one where he gave a short and strange answer to a couple of questions about Nick Sirianni. That’s resulted in both sports talk radio stations and pretty much everyone else involved in Philly sports media asking some version of “Is this a problem? Are you concerned? Does the quarterback hate the head coach’s guts?”

If you’re living under a rock and didn’t see it, here you go:

Maybe there’s something to this, or maybe not! Only Jalen Hurts and Nick Sirianni truly know. I think it’s pretty obvious that Hurts was bummed about the departure of Brian Johnson, who was more than a coach and someone he had known and worked with over the course of many years. Perhaps there’s some coded language in these pressers to suggest that Jalen is still unhappy about that. We also know that Hurts comes from the Nick Saban school of “rat poison,” and oftentimes gives nothing burger answers while sometimes mistaking perfectly reasonable questions for some sort of insidious angling instead. Nevertheless, nobody loves to overanalyze a press conference more than the Philadelphia sports media:


Is this a story? Yeah, it’s a story, but not on June 11th. It’s a story during training camp, or during the season, or immediately after the season, but we just got through OTAs and now all you’re hearing about is a possible CONFLICT between the head coach and quarterback. Nobody needs to be bludgeoned to death with “does this concern you” Eagles talk three weeks before Independence Day. We’ve got the entire season to stuff Xanax down our gullets spread Negadelphia throughout the region. Summer is for going outside and touching grass.

When we did the latest Crossing Broadcast, Harry Mayes said that he once went to 97.5 the Fanatic program director Matt Nahigian with an idea to get around the stale and vapid summer Eagles talk:

“I have actually proposed to him that sports radio should just take the whole month of July off. It should be required that the WIP guys, the Fanatic guys, all have to take the month off because it’s the slowest month of the year and you’re trying to drum up Eagles conversation when there really isn’t any. I’m all for moratoriums.”

I’ve always felt like ‘less is more’ in the sense that you’re better at something, or have a renewed interest in something, if you can table it entirely for a certain amount of time. In this case, I really do believe that you’re going to get higher quality Eagles talk when training camp begins if people split from the Birds during the summer and recharge the batteries instead. These radio hosts shouldn’t have to slog through this bullshit in June and July, because by the time camp rolls around, they’re already exhausted. I’m already worn out with this Sirianni and Hurts thing and we’re still three months away from the season opener in Brazil. Let me at least get through October before I start hating this Eagles team with every fiber of my being.

It’s not just sports talk radio beating the dead summer horse, but we generally zero in on them because they’ve got the most time to fill. If we’re being honest, doing  20 hours every week is hard, and I don’t think most people realize that. Even if you’re a diehard baseball fan, you can’t talk Phillies for four hours a day from June 1st until training camp begins. The winter sports are done, the four for four fans don’t care about the Union, and NBA/NHL finals talk is rudimentary because 1) the teams aren’t Philly teams and 2) nobody on the radio can talk hockey anyway. That’s why management deserves more scrutiny than the hosts when it comes to this specific issue. When you program your entire product around the Philadelphia Eagles, and in WIP’s case hire three former Eagles to sit in the anchor chair, then yeah you’re going to be limited when the Eagles aren’t playing. As a result, we get the square peg/round hole of summer sports talk radio because they’ve made the conscious decision to keep playing the hits instead of trying something different, even if it’s just a couple of weeks, once per year.

Regardless it’s “too much horse shit,” as Peter Laviolette once said. Too much banal Eagles shit on June 11th.