How Eagles benefit so much from hard-fought W over Cards

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They can’t all be blowouts. They can’t all be pretty.

That seems to be the message legendary Villanova head coach Jay Wright texts Nick Sirianni before games, saying, “You have to claw, scratch, whatever you need to do to take it out in the end.”

The Eagles did that on Sunday in Arizona.

And, really, that’s what the last couple weeks have been about. They got punched in the mouth against the Jaguars two weeks ago and fought their way back. The Cardinals on Sunday staged a comeback attempt and the Eagles were able to hold them off.

Back-to-back weeks. Back-to-back wins. And the Eagles had to fight for both in different ways.

“Yeah, I would love to win every game by a lot,” Sirianni said on Monday. “I really would. Those are a lot less stressful. You know you played a good game when you hold them to 7 and you score 30, or whatever it is, right?

“But that's not the reality of this league. You're going to go through the grind. In fact, more games are going to be like they were yesterday than they were for our first couple games — or for our Washington game or our Minnesota game. There is a heck of a lot more games like yesterday than those couple games.”

Through five weeks of the 2022 season, the Eagles are the NFL’s only unbeaten team at 5-0. And Sirianni’s right. There are going to be more close games than blowouts.

Of the Eagles’ five wins this season, three have been one-possession games and that’s pretty much on-par for the league average. In fact, that average is up this season — 60.8% of NFL games in 2022 have been decided by 8 points or fewer.

Here’s a look at those averages over the last five NFL seasons:

2021: 46.7%

2020: 53.1%

2019: 52.3%

2018: 53.1%

2017: 47.3%

Of course, sometimes a final score looks closer than it was. And sometimes it looks like more of a blowout than it was. But over time, it balances out. And the point remains the same: It’s tough to win in this league.

Losing can definitely develop character.

But the Eagles can learn from their mistakes when they win too. And there’s plenty to learn from their 20-17 win on Sunday.

It’s about judging the process, while realizing the results are all that matter.

A lot of people remember the blowouts from the 2017 season and they were great; it was a blast. This Eagles team would love to have some more of them too. But those Super Bowl Eagles also beat the Giants by 3 points, the Chargers by 2 and the Panthers by 5 that season. If they don’t win those tough games, they’re not the No. 1 seed and, perhaps more importantly, they wouldn’t have been able to grow from some adversity.

The mark of a good team is sometimes just winning no matter what.

Ideally, the Eagles would have simply put the Cardinals away early on Sunday, they would have asserted their dominance and cruised to a win. But that didn’t happen. And, realistically, that can’t happen every week.

“So, you just like to be able to win any way,” Sirianni said. “You go through it and you're happy with the win no matter what. You're dissatisfied with the things that you want to correct. First of all, as coaches, and then secondly as the players.

“You just try to go through and fix that as you would, but of course there are benefits to winning every way, and you say to yourself, well, we're going to be in those games more so than not, so it's good when you win those games.”

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