Ah, the perils of being a Super Bowl team.
That is what the Eagles are facing at the moment from their demanding fan base, which doesn’t seem satisfied with a 2-0 record entering their game Monday night at Tampa Bay (2-0).
When a team is the class of its division (the NFC East), has a legitimate MVP candidate at quarterback (Jalen Hurts) and was in the Super Bowl just seven months ago, style points apparently are now required.
Hurts and the Eagles haven’t been dominant in their first two games, a scratchy five-point win over the Patriots and a six-point win at home over the Vikings.
“Listen, are we going to be playing the same football we played on Feb. 12 last year [in the Super Bowl] right now? No, we’re not. Nobody is,” Eagles coach Nick Sirianni told reporters this week. “We’re on this climb. We’re starting back from the beginning.
“The thing we did best last year was take it one day at a time, one game at a time, everything, little bits at a time. It’s a hard mindset to have, because you want to have the expectations. And, it’s not necessarily the expectations of us. It’s expectations of the outside world.”
The Eagles went 14-3 in the regular season last year and lost to the Chiefs in the Super Bowl.
“We understand everybody is going to have opinions, and we just have to focus on ourselves,” Sirianni said. “We have to focus on getting better every day. It’s really as boring and monotonous as that. Just put your head down, go to work, block out noise if you’re somebody that gets affected by that.”
On the other side of this game, the Buccaneers are battling what they believe are misperceptions about themselves.
After three seasons with Tom Brady at quarterback, a run that included a Super Bowl victory and three playoff appearances, Tampa Bay is trying to move on now that the legendary star has retired.
The Buccaneers are doing that with journeyman quarterback Baker Mayfield, and expectations were not exactly lofty entering this season. Yet here are the Bucs at 2-0 after they defeated the Vikings on the road then beat the Bears last week.
They’re doing it with Mayfield, who is on his fourth team in two years and coming off a season in which he lost eight of 10 starts with the Panthers and Rams.
Mayfield said this week he’s well aware of the “narrative’’ that the Bucs were supposed to struggle in the post-Brady era, but that he and the team have ignored that prediction.
“We known the whole time what we have in this locker room and the team that we’re trying to build, where we’re trying to head,” Mayfield told reporters this week. “The important part now is not letting the outside noise affect us in the building. We didn’t let it affect us before, why let it do it now?”
Monday night against the Super Bowl runners-up figures to be a truer indicator to how good the Buccaneers really are. Low-key Tampa Bay head coach Todd Bowles, of course, downplayed that this week.
“We look at every week like that,’’ Bowles said. “The fact that they’re 2-0 and went to the Super Bowl doesn’t bother us. We’re trying to go 3-0. There’s going to be challenges every week for us [and] they’re going to be bigger as the weeks go on. We’re looking to get better as a team, no matter who we’re playing.”
The Tampa Bay defense will have perhaps the biggest challenge, considering the Eagles have the NFL’s No. 2-ranked rushing offense, averaging 178 yards per game. Hurts rushed for two touchdowns and threw for a third against the Vikings, and running back D’Andre Swift, in his first season with Philadelphia, rushed for a career-high 175 rushing on 28 carries in that game.
Asked if he’ll continue to ride Swift, who was acquired in the offseason from Detroit, Sirianni said: “We’re going to ride the hot hand. If he’s got the hot hand on Monday night, we’ll keep rolling with him.”
That could be the matchup of the game, because the Bucs are allowing just 52 rushing yards per game, the second-fewest in the NFL. On the other side of the ball, the Eagles defense is ranked No. 1 against the run, allowing 51 yards per game.
All of that could lay this game in the hands of Mayfield, who has played turnover-free ball and has a 104.4 passer rating.
It all makes for a fascinating prime-time matchup as the only game on the NFL’s Week 3 schedule pitting a pair of undefeated teams against each other.
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