PHILADELPHIA – Inside the house of the last Eagles coach who oversaw a collapse such as this, the landline phone rang three times before Rich Kotite’s wife, Elizabeth, answered.
Which was worse? It’s the question that the 2023-24 Eagles are in danger of raising. Which Chernobyl moment, which meltdown of a promising pro football season in Philadelphia, was worse? This team is making a run at the title: defending NFC champions, a 10-1 start, an acid cascade of five losses over the season’s final six games, Nick Sirianni’s job status up in the air, a feeling of despair and resignation hovering over Monday’s wild-card game in Tampa against the Buccaneers.
But those 1994 Eagles, Kotite’s Eagles, were the standard for a long time – the NFL equivalent of the ’64 Phillies, just 30 years later. They weren’t expected to contend for a Super Bowl, but they won seven of their first nine games to challenge the Cowboys for the NFC East crown. They were rolling until they weren’t, until they lost their last seven games, and Jeffrey Lurie, seven months after he had bought the franchise, fired Kotite.
That’s the fascinating comparison here: the circumstances that led Lurie to change coaches then and … well, no one outside One NovaCare Way really knows what he’s going to do now, do they? He offered that strange smile and a head-shake no-comment after descending an elevator at MetLife Stadium last Sunday, after the Eagles’ embarrassing loss to the Giants, then entered the locker room without a word. There’s mystery to Sirianni’s fate now. There wasn’t much, if any, to Kotite’s. Lurie was a new owner – new to the city, new to the league. He wanted to make his mark and bring in his own guy. Going into that ‘94 season, it might have taken a 16-0 regular season and a 77-0 victory in Supr Bowl XXIX for Kotite to stay.
