Eagles

With Andy Reid in the Super Bowl, Prepare for Two Insufferable Weeks of Topics We’ve Already Beaten to Death

By Kevin Kinkead

Published: Jan 29th, 2024 · 9:45 AM EST

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The Detroit Lions’ choke job set up a 49ers/Chiefs Super Bowl, which, for Philadelphia Eagles fans, feels like a contest between Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

Whoever wins, we lose.

Regardless, it’s going to be a long couple of weeks, unless you’re sports talk radio and more than happy to beat the Andy Reid topic to death for the umpteenth time.

Joe DeCamara, who has the morning show humming and is 400 times better than his predecessor, couldn’t even wait for the Lions’ twitching corpse to be hauled out of Levi’s Stadium before asking the question that 94 WIP asks every single time Andy Reid goes to the Super Bowl:

I’m going to ask a question nobody is going to be in the mood to hear …..

If the Eagles hadn’t fired Andy after 2012 (which I thought was right at the time), how many Super Bowl wins would the Eagles have between 2013 and the soon-to-be-completed 2023 season?

0? 1? 2? 3? 4? 5?

— Joe DeCamara (@JoeDeCamara) January 28, 2024

This was a feeler tweet, to shape show prep for the following morning, and sure enough, that’s going to be the theme of the show for the next two weeks:

“Maybe the last 11 years of Eagles history would be even better if they haven’t fired Andy Reid?

“Here’s what I do know—Andy Reid is better than anything the Eagles have had.”

— @JoeDeCamara https://t.co/h1UoV2exuz pic.twitter.com/AMvjuKcLdL

— SPORTSRADIO 94WIP (@SportsRadioWIP) January 29, 2024

We’ve already litigated, re-litigated, and re-re-litigated this topic a million times over, but just for the sake the article we can do a very brief recap.

1) The Eagles won their Super Bowl and Andy won his Super Bowl, so the majority of non-idiot Eagles fans who don’t hold some ridiculous, 15-year-old grudge should be happy for everyone. 2) Anybody who was alive in 2012 knows the Birds were cooked and both sides needed to separate, for everyone’s mental health and sanity. 3) Andy Reid didn’t win shit in Kansas City until Patrick Mahomes showed up. He made them respectable, absolutely, but only won two playoff games between 2013 and 2018. 4) The Eagles went to the Super Bowl twice without Big Red.

So no, the answer is no. It’s been “no” for more than a decade. The last 11 years of Eagles history would not have been “even better” if they hadn’t fired Andy Reid. It was way past time for both sides to move on, and both are doing very well for themselves. Both sides won a Super Bowl within eight years of the split, and the Birds might have two if not for running into the Chiefs themselves.

I wrote this in 2020:

I think the proper take here is actually very simple. Sometimes a divorce works out for both sides. The Eagles tried out Chip Kelly, which wasn’t the right fit, then stumbled into a Reid disciple and won a Super Bowl with a quarterback that Andy convinced not to retire. And when Big Red went to KC, he evolved as a coach, built another powerhouse, and is now playing in another Super Bowl.

That’s a pragmatic take, which doesn’t work on sports talk radio, because then there would be nothing to talk about. These guys have to do 40 hours of radio before the Super Bowl, so I’m sympathetic to the fact that they can’t just show up in the studio and say “let’s move on,” or god forbid, talk about the Flyers. If they moved on, then there would be no reason for sports talk radio or even sports media to exist.

But for fuck’s sake, we’ve done this same Andy Reid topic four times in the last five years. We did it in 2019, 2020, 2022, and now in the 2023/2024 season. It was fine to do it once or even twice, but at this point we’re just re-racking the same shows and same columns. It’s dead. It’s over. There is nothing left to talk about.